ould creep up into the companion, always in the
hopes of finding the lights of a ship close to, but nothing came of our
rockets, whilst I doubt if the little blast the quarter-deck pop-gun
delivered was audible half a mile away to windward. But though the
night remained a horrible black shadow--the blacker for the phantasmal
sheets of foam which defined, without illuminating it, the wind about
this time--somewhere between four and five o'clock--had greatly
moderated. Yet at dawn it was blowing hard still, with an iron-grey,
freckled sea rolling hollow and confusedly, and a near horizon thick
with mist.

There was nothing in sight. The yacht looked deplorably sodden and
wrecked as she pitched and wallowed in the cold, desolate, ashen
atmosphere of that daybreak. The men, too, wore the air of castaway
mariners, fagged, salt-whitened, pinched; and their faces, even the
boy's, looked aged with anxiety.

I called to Caudel. He approached me slowly, as a man might walk after
a swim that has nearly spent him.

"Here is another day, Caudel. What is to be done?"

"What can be done, sir?" answered the poor fellow, with the irritation
of exhaustion and of anxiety but little removed from despair. "We must
go on pumping for our lives, and pray to the Lord that we may be picked
up."

"Why not get sail upon the yacht, put her before the wind, and run for
the French coast?"

"If you like sir," he answered languidly, "but it's a long stretch to
the French coast, and if the wind should shift--" he paused, and looked
as though worry had weakened his mind a little and rendered him
incapable of deciding swiftly and for the best.

The boy Bobby was pumping, and I took notice of the glass-like
clearness of the water as it gushed out to the strokes of the little
brake. The others of my small crew were crouching under the lee of the
weather bulwark. I looked at them, and then said to Caudel:

"Shall we call a council? Something must be done. Those men have
lives to save, and I should like to have their opinion."

He at once halloaed to them, and they grouped themselves about me as I
stood in the companion way. Every man's voice was hoarse with fatigue,
and the skin of the poor fellows' faces had a puffed, pale appearance
that made one think of drowned bodies.

I asked them what they thought of my proposal of running for the French
shore under all the sail we could spread; but after some discussion
they were unanimous in