see that happy home again. The avenging bolt of
God had overtaken me. No mother would ever weep above my ashes, no
kind hand would deck the sod with flowers. My doom was to be tossed to
and fro, midway down the depths of ocean, until the trumpet of the
arch-angel should sound.

The night began to close in. Darker and darker the shades of evening
fell around the waste of waters, and the wind, as it went by, seemed
moaning my requiem. Occasionally the lightning threw a ghastly
radiance across the water. I was cold, weary, and half stupefied. My
senses began to desert me. No longer able to buffet against fate as I
had done, I took in each moment larger draughts of the briny element.
In fact I was drowning. Things actual and things visionary--the
present and the past--began to commingle in my brain in a wild
phantasmagoria. Faces of childhood, the sweet faces of my dead
brothers and sisters, looked at me from the sky above; while hideous
ones, the countenances seen in fever-dreams, grinned out from the
spray around. Confused noises, too, were in my ears. There was music
as if from celestial spheres; then notes as if demons laughed in the
gale. Gradually all things, seen or heard, became more and more
indistinct; a dead blank swum before me, leaving only the sensation of
blackness: and then followed utter forgetfulness, the stupor of the
dead--or rather that trance between life and death, when the body is
exhausted but the vital spark not yet fled--that one dread pause
between this world and the next.

I have no recollection of any thing further, until I was partially
roused from my insensibility by a hand being laid on me. The next
instant I was dragged violently through the water, and thrown on my
chest across some sharp substance, which I concluded was the gunwale
of a boat. I fell with such force as to eject from me, as from a
force-pump, the water I had swallowed. The excessive pain roused me to
more complete consciousness. I languidly opened my eyes. I thought I
recognized familiar faces: the doubt was settled immediately by a well
known voice.

"Easy there, Jack--poor fellow! he is almost gone--now, my hearties!"

The words were spoken in the kind tone of the mate. I knew now that I
had been picked up by our ship's boat. She was lying head-on to the
waves, to prevent her being swamped while she took me up. Obeying the
directions of the mate, the men with a second effort lifted me
completely out of the water, and