k and silent figure
upon the grating, who a few brief hours before had been the head and
chief of their small community; the man to whose knowledge and skill
they had willingly committed their fortunes and themselves, who had
ruled them as with a rod of iron, whose will was their law, who had held
their very lives in his hands, at whose caprice they were either happy
or miserable, and who now lay there without the power to move so much as
a finger either to help or hurt them, and whose lifeless clay they were
about to launch to its last resting-place, there to repose "till the sea
gives up her dead,"--this, with the wailing moan of the wind aloft, the
sobbing of the water alongside, and the solemn glory of the dying day
all uniting to imbue the scene and the occasion with a profundity of
sadness and a sublimity that would have been impossible under other
circumstances. And so deeply was Leslie moved by it that, for the first
time since the words of his cruel and unjust sentence had fallen upon
his ears, he once more felt, to conviction, that God the Creator, God
the Ordainer, God the Father was and must be an ever-living and
omnipotent entity. And for the first time, also, since then he followed
the prayers that Purchas droned out with an earnest and heartfelt
sincerity at which he felt himself vaguely astonished.

At length the mate reached the words in the service, "we therefore
commit his body to the deep," whereupon the two men who supported the
inner end of the grating tilted it high, and the heavily weighted body,
sliding out from beneath the outspread ensign, plunged with a sullen
splash into its lonely grave. The remainder of the service was quickly
gone through; and as the little party of mourners rose from their knees
with the pronouncement of the last "Amen," the sun's disc vanished in a
blaze of indescribable glory beneath the horizon, while at the same
moment "four bells" pealed out along the brig's deck.

"Go for'ard, men," ordered Purchas, replacing his cap upon his head;
"and see that that gratin' is stowed away again in its proper place.
Haul down that ensign, one of you. And whose trick at the wheel is it?"

For the next three or four days nothing worthy of mention occurred on
board the brig, save that the breeze which had sprung up on the morning
of the day of Potter's death held good, and ran them fairly into the
Trades. Our next vision of the _Mermaid_, therefore, shows her bruising
along und