ereigns. Meanwhile, the
steward appeared with blankets, which he spread on the locker; and,
blowing out the lamp, went on deck with a "good night."

It was very still, and unusually dark. There was dead silence in the
corvette. Presently, I crawled softly to the stern window, and lying
flat on my stomach over the transom, peered out into night. There,
in reality, was my boat towing astern by a slack line! As I gazed,
some one on deck above me drew in the rope with softest motion,
until the skiff lay close under the windows. Patiently, slowly,
cautiously,--fearing the sound of his fall, and dreading almost the
rush of my breath in the profound silence,--I lowered my boy into
the boat. The basket followed. The negro fastened the boat-hook to
the cabin window, and on this, lame as I was, I followed the
basket. Fortunately, not a plash, a crack, or a footfall disturbed
the silence. I looked aloft, and no one was visible on the
quarter-deck. A slight jerk brought the boat-rope softly into the
water, and I drifted away into the darkness.

CHAPTER XXXI.

I drifted without a word or motion, and almost without breathing,
until the corvette was perfectly obliterated against the hazy horizon.
When every thing was dark around me, save the guiding stars, I put out
the oars and pulled quietly towards the east. At day-dawn I was
apparently alone on the ocean.

My appetite had improved so hugely by the night's exercise, that my
first devotion was to the basket, which I found crammed with bologna
sausages, a piece of salt junk, part of a ham, abundance of biscuit,
four bottles of water, two of brandy, a pocket compass, a jack-knife,
and a large table-cloth or sheet, which the generous doctor had no
doubt inserted to serve as a sail.

The humbled _slaver_ and the _slave_, for the first time in their
lives, broke bread from the same basket, and drank from the same
bottle! Misfortune had strangely and suddenly levelled us on the basis
of common humanity. The day before, he was the most servile of
menials; to-day he was my equal, and, probably, my superior in certain
physical powers, without which I would have perished!

As the sun ascended in the sky, my wound became irritated by exercise,
and the inflammation produced a feverish torment in which I groaned as
I lay extended in the stern-sheets. By noon a breeze sprang up from
the south-west, so that the oars and table-cloth supplied a square
sail which wafted us about three