now that it is lucky I could recall but little more. Experience is
less terrible than realization, and that poem makes me realize what I
went through as memory cannot. It has verses which would have driven me
mad. On the other hand, the exhaustive mental search for them distracted
my thoughts until the stars were back in the sky; and now I had a new
occupation, saying to myself all the poetry I could remember, especially
that of the sea; for I was a bookish fellow even then. But I never
was anything of a scholar. It is odd therefore, that the one apposite
passage which recurred to me in its entirety was in hexameters and
pentameters:

Me miserum, quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
Jam jam tacturos sidera summa putes.
Quantae diducto subsidunt aequore valles!
Jam jam tacturas Tartara nigra putes.
Quocunque adspicio, nihil est nisi pontus et aether;
Fluctibus hic tumidis, nubibus ille minax....

More there was of it in my head; but this much was an accurate statement
of my case; and yet less so now (I was thankful to reflect) than in
the morning, when every wave was indeed a mountain, and its trough a
Tartarus. I had learnt the lines at school; nay, they had formed my very
earliest piece of Latin repetition. And how sharply I saw the room I
said them in, the man I said them to, ever since my friend! I figured
him even now hearing Ovid rep., the same passage in the same room. And I
lay saying it on a hen-coop in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!

At last I fell into a deep sleep, a long unconscious holiday of the
soul, undefiled by any dream.

They say that our dreaming is done as we slowly wake; then was I out of
the way of it that night, for a sudden violent rocking awoke me in
one horrid instant. I made it worse by the way I started to a sitting
posture. I had shipped some water. I was shipping more. Yet all around
the sea was glassy; whence then the commotion? As my ship came trim
again, and I saw that my hour was not yet, the cause occurred to me; and
my heart turned so sick that it was minutes before I had the courage to
test my theory.

It was the true one.

A shark had been at my trailing fowls; had taken the bunch of them
together, dragging the legs from my loose fastenings. Lucky they had
been no stronger! Else had I been dragged down to perdition too.

Lucky, did I say? The refinement of cruelty rather; for now I had
neither meat nor drink; my throat was a kiln; my tongue a flame; and
a