e grateful sense of coolness, in spite
of the boiling blood in his veins, that Mark Woolston experienced when
he stepped beneath the shade of the poop-deck of the Rancocus. The young
man knew that he was about to be seriously ill and his life might depend
on the use he made of the next hour, or half-hour, even. He threw
himself on a settee, to get a little rest, and while there he
endeavoured to reflect on his situation, and to remember what he ought
to do. The medicine-chest always stood in the cabin, and he had used its
contents too often among the crew, not to have some knowledge of their
general nature and uses. Potions were kept prepared in that depository,
and he staggered to the table, opened the chest, took a ready-mixed dose
of the sort he believed best for him, poured water on it from the
filterer, and swallowed it. Our mate ever afterwards believed that
draught saved his life. It soon made him deadly sick, and produced an
action in his whole system. For an hour he was under its influence, when
he was enabled to get into his berth, exhausted and literally unable any
longer to stand. How long he remained in that berth, or near it
rather--for he was conscious of having crawled from it in quest of
water, and for other purposes, on several occasions--but, how long he
was confined to his cabin, Mark Woolston never knew. The period was
certainly to be measured by days, and he sometimes fancied by weeks. The
first probably was the truth, though it might have been a fortnight.
Most of that time his head was light with fever, though there were
intervals when reason was, at least partially, restored to him, and he
became painfully conscious of the horrors of his situation. Of food and
water he had a sufficiency, the filterer and a bread-bag being quite
near him, and he helped himself often from the first, in particular; a
single mouthful of the ship's biscuit commonly proving more than he
could swallow, even after it was softened in the water. At length he
found himself indisposed to rise at all, and he certainly remained
eight-and-forty hours in his berth, without quitting it, and almost
without sleeping, though most of the time in a sort of doze.

At length the fever abated in its violence, though it began to assume,
what for a man in Mark Woolston's situation was perhaps more dangerous,
a character of a low type, lingering in his system and killing him by
inches. Mark was aware of his condition, and though: of the mea