IPPER

I clung to that heaven-sent bit of wreckage, exhausted and weary, until
the light began to break in the east. I was numbed and shivering with
cold--but I was alive and safe. That square yard of good and solid wood
was as much to me as if it had been a floating island. And as the light
grew and grew, and the sun at last came up, a ball of fire out of the far
horizon, I looked across the sea on all sides, hoping to catch sight of a
sail, or of a wisp of smoke--of anything that would tell me of the near
presence of human beings. And one fact I realized at once--I was further
away from land than when I had begun my battle with death. There was no
sign of land in the west. The sky was now clear and bright on all sides,
but there was nothing to break the line where it met the sea. Before the
fading of the light on the previous evening, I had easily made out the
well-known outlines of the Cheviots on one hand and of Says Law on the
other--now there was not a vestige of either. I knew from that fact that
I had somehow drifted further and further away from the coast. There was
accordingly nothing to do but wait the chance of being sighted and picked
up, and I set to work, as well as I could on my tiny raft, to chafe my
limbs and get some warmth into my body. And never in my life did I bless
the sun as I did that morning, for when he sprang out of bed in the
northeast skies, it was with his full and hearty vigour of high
springtide, and his heat warmed my chilled blood and sent a new glow of
hope to my heart. But that heat was not an unmixed blessing--and I was
already parched with thirst; and as the sun mounted higher and higher,
pouring his rays full upon me, the thirst became almost intolerable, and
my tongue felt as if my mouth could no longer contain it.

It was, perhaps, one hour after sunrise, when my agony was becoming
almost insupportable, that I first noticed a wisp of smoke on the
southern rim of the circle of sea which just then was all my world. I
never strained my eyes for anything as I did for that patch of grey
against the cloudless blue! It grew bigger and bigger--I knew, of course,
that it was some steamer, gradually approaching. But it seemed ages
before I could make out her funnels; ages before I saw the first bit of
her black bulk show up above the level of the dancing waves. Yet there
she was at last--coming bows on, straight in my direction. My nerves must
have given out at the sight--I remember th