ls vividly before them, and their lips would move and the
impalpable morsels roll sweetly over their tongues.

It had become a second nature to scour the horizon with jealous eyes:
never for a moment during their long martyrdom had their covetous sight
fixed upon a stationary object. But it came at last. Out of a cloud a
sail burst like a flickering flame. What an age it was a-coming! how it
budded and blossomed like a glorious white flower, that was transformed
suddenly into a barque bearing down upon them! Almost within hail it
stayed its course, the canvas fluttered in the wind; the dark hull
slowly rose and fell upon the water; figures moved to and fro--men,
living and breathing men! Then the ghosts staggered to their feet and
cried to God for mercy. Then they waved their arms, and beat their
breasts, and lifted up their imploring voices, beseeching deliverance
out of that horrible bondage. Tears coursed down their hollow cheeks,
their limbs quaked, their breath failed them: they sank back in despair,
speechless and forsaken.

Why did they faint in the hour of deliverance when that narrow chasm was
all that separated them from renewed life? Because the barque spread out
her great white wings and soared away, hearing not the faint voices,
seeing not the thin shadows that haunted that drifting wreck. The
forsaken ones looked out from their eyrie, and watched the lessening
sail until sight failed them, and then the lad with one wild cry leaped
toward the speeding barque, and was swallowed up in the sea.

Alone in a wilderness of waters! Alone, without compass or rudder, borne
on by relentless winds into the lonesome, dreary, shoreless ocean of
despair, within whose blank and forbidding sphere no voyager ventures;
across whose desolate waste dawn sends no signal and night brings no
reprieve; but whose sun is cold, and whose moon is clouded, and whose
stars withdraw into space, and where the insufferable silence of vacancy
shall not be broken for all time.

O pitiless Nature! thy irrevocable laws argue rare sacrifice in the
waste places of God's universe!...

* * * * *

The Petrel gave a tremendous lurch, that sent two or three of us into
the lee corners of the cabin; a sea broke over us, bursting in the
companion-hatch, and half filling our small and insecure retreat; the
swinging lamp was thrown from its socket and extinguished; we were
enveloped in pitch-darkness, up to our knees i