t for a piece of raw
deerskin and utterly without food save for the few nauseous berries or
offal rejected by the Indians. In their ignorance of the coast they
wandered farther and farther out of their way into those morasses which
an old writer calls "the refuge of all unclean birds and the
breeding-fields of all reptiles." Once a tidal wave swept down into a
vast marsh where they had built their fire, and air and ground slowly
darkened with the swarming living creatures, whirring, creeping about
them through the night, and uttering gloomy, dissonant cries. Many of
these strange companions and some savages found their way to the hill of
oyster-shells where the crew fled, and remained there for the two days
and nights in which the flood lasted.

Our baby accepted all fellow-travellers cheerfully; made them welcome,
indeed. Savage, slave, and beast were his friends alike, his laugh and
outstretched hands were ready for them all. The aged man, too, Dickenson
tells us, remained hopeful and calm, even when the slow-coming touch of
death had begun to chill and stiffen him, and in the presence of the
cannibals assuring his companions cheerfully of his faith that they
would yet reach home in safety. Even in that strange, forced halt, when
Mary Dickenson could do nothing but stand still and watch the sea
closing about them, creeping up and up like a visible death, the old
man's prayers and the baby's laugh must have kept the thought of her far
home very near and warm to her.

They escaped the sea to fall into worse dangers. Disease was added to
starvation. One by one strong men dropped exhausted by the way, and were
left unburied, while the others crept feebly on; stout Jonathan
Dickenson taking as his charge the old man, now almost a helpless burden.
Mary, who, underneath her gentle, timid ways, seems to have had a
gallant heart in her little body, carried her baby to the last, until
the milk in her breast was quite dried and her eyes grew blind, and she
too fell one day beside a poor negress who, with her unborn child, lay
frozen and dead, saying that she was tired, and that the time had come
for her too to go. Dickenson lifted her and struggled on.

The child was taken by the negroes and sailors. It makes a mother's
heart ache even now to read how these coarse, famished men, often
fighting like wild animals with each other, staggering under weakness
and bodily pain, carried the heavy baby, never complaining of its weight,