feelings we watched them gradually growing less
on the horizon, and realised that we were at the mercy of an angry sea,
with no support but a piece of broken timber, and every moment finding
ourselves more and more alone, as comrade after comrade gave up the
struggle and fell back among the waves.

Presently Mr Gamble, whose leg, I found, had been crushed by the
explosion, groaned, and his head fell forward. Three great waves in
succession washed over us with the force of a falling wall; and when
they had passed, and I looked to my companion, he was dead, with the
life simply beaten out of him.

Sorrowfully enough I unlashed him, and let him drop beneath the pitiless
water; and then, finding my own strength beginning to fail, I lashed
myself under the arms and over the spar, and hung on for dear life. In
this posture I spent weary hour after hour watching the waves, and
endeavouring to ward off from my head the fury of their onslaught.

About mid-day the gale eased somewhat. I looked about me. Not a sign
or vestige remained of the _Zebra_ or her hapless crew. Not a floating
thing among the waves caused me to count on the company of a living
wretch like myself. Not even a livid corpse across my track served to
remind me that I, of all that ship's company, still clung to life.

Strange visions, as I rose and fell with the heaving sea, floated before
my eyes. The gloomy kitchen at Kilgorman, and my mother's letter
gleaming under the hearthstone--the hollow on the cliff's edge where Tim
and I had once fought--Biddy McQuilkin sitting at the fireside in our
cabin, setting her cap at my father--Miss Kit with the gun at her
shoulder behind the hall-door at Knockowen--the unhappy old man being
dragged to the guillotine in Paris--the lumbering barge floating down
the Seine--Tim in the light of the lantern at the helm of the
_Kestrel_;--these and many other visions chased one another across my
memory, first in regular procession, then tripping one over the other,
then all jumbled and mixed together in such chaos that it was Kit who
was being haled to the guillotine, and Tim who lay below the
hearthstone, and Biddy who navigated the barge.

Presently one vision seemed to hang in my memory longer than the others,
and that was the light of the morning sun as it struck on the retreating
sails of the brig _Scheldt_ of Rotterdam, standing out to sea off Malin.
One by one all my other fancies merged into this--the guillotine