end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the
papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after
the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying
motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir
of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth
below--never a sign of life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and
Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement,
to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous stillness.

"... The relations of shipwrecks in the olden time tell us of much
suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die
miserably from starvation on a barren coast; others suffered violent
death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence
with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion,
dislike or fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful.
It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless,
incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of
the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild
parts of the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to
suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most
innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay,
almost within sight from this very window.

"He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, in the course of time we
discovered he did not even know that ships had names--'like Christian
people'; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he beheld
the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air
of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And
probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been hustled
together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth
of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary
to see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the
'tweendeck and battened down from the very start. It was a low timber
dwelling--he would say--with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in
his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very
cold, damp and sombre, with places in the manner of wooden boxes where
people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all ways
at once all the time. He crept into one of these boxes and laid