mast had snapped short off immediately above the
lashings that bound it to the stump of the original spar, and had gone
over the stern, some of its gear having evidently struck Leslie down as
the spar fell. The foremast was also over the side, having gone close
to the deck; and all the wreckage was still floating alongside attached
to the hull by the rigging. The bulwarks had all disappeared save some
ten or twelve feet on either side extending from the taffrail, forward,
and a few feet in the eyes of the ship. The decks had been swept clean
of every movable thing, including the longboat and the jolly-boat that
had been stowed on the main hatch; and both quarter-boats had also
vanished from the davits, leaving only fragments of their stem and
stern-posts hanging to the tackle blocks to show what had happened to
them.

No part of the reef showed above water, but its extent and limits were
very clearly defined by the ripples and agitation--gentle though this
last was--of the surface of the water above it. The surf was breaking
heavily on its outer margin in clouds of gleaming white that flashed and
glittered in the brilliant sunshine; and an occasional undulation of
swell came sweeping in across the reef, causing a thousand swirls and
eddies to appear as it traversed the vast barrier of submerged rock--
coral, Leslie judged it to be--but it did not affect the brig in the
least, sending not even the faintest tremor through her, by which the
sick man judged that she must have been deposited in her present
position at a moment when the level of the sea was considerably higher
than it was just then. The craft was lying so close to the inner edge
of the reef that had she been carried another fifty yards she would have
been swept right over it; in which case she would undoubtedly have at
once sunk in the deep-water that lay between this outer barrier reef and
the island some three miles away--not two miles, as Miss Trevor had
estimated the distance.

But, oh, that island! When Miss Trevor had spoken of it Leslie pictured
to himself some tiny, obscure, bare atoll of perhaps a mile in length,
and not more than a dozen feet high at its highest point--knowing from
his reckoning that, at the time of the fatal outbreak, the brig had not
been near enough _any known_ land to render wreck upon it possible. But
the land upon which he gazed with wondering eyes measured fully three
miles from one extremity to the other--with a prom