uty. I must be a man, ask
God for courage to meet whatever may betide, and stoutly endure what
cannot be evaded."

Do not smile at the simple thoughts of a poor castaway sailor. I hold
them still to be good reasoning, and had my flesh been as strong as my
spirit they had availed, I don't doubt. But I was chilled to the marrow;
the mere knowing that there was nothing to eat sharpened my appetite,
and I felt as if I had not tasted food for a week; and here then were
physical conditions which broke ruinously into philosophy and staggered
religious trust.

My mind went to the schooner, yet I felt an extraordinary recoil within
me when I thought of seeking an asylum in her. I had the figure of her
before my fancy, viewed the form of the man on her deck, and the idea of
penetrating her dark interior and seeking shelter in a fabric that time
and frost and death had wrought into a black mystery was dreadful to me.
Nor was this all. It seemed like the very last expression of despair to
board that stirless frame; to make a dwelling-place, without prospect of
deliverance, in that hollow of ice; to become in one sense as dead as
her lonely mariner, yet preserve all the sensibility of the living to a
condition he was as unconscious of as the ice that enclosed him.

It must be done nevertheless, thought I; I shall certainly perish from
exposure if I linger here; besides, how do I know but that I may
discover in that ship some means of escaping from the island? Assuredly
there was plenty of material in her for the building of a boat, if I
could meet with tools. Or possibly I might find a boat under hatches,
for it was common for vessels of her class and in her time to stow their
pinnaces in the hold, and, when the necessity for using them arose, to
hoist them out and tow them astern.

These reflections somewhat heartened me, and also let me add that the
steady mounting of the wind into a small gale served to reconcile me,
not indeed to the loss of my boat, but to my detention; for though there
might be a miserable languishing end for me here, I could not but
believe that there was certain death, too, out there in that high swell
and in those sharpening peaks of water off whose foaming heads the wind
was blowing the spray. By which I mean the boat could not have plyed in
such a wind; she must have run, and by running have carried me into the
stormier regions of the south, where, even if she had lived, I must
speedily have starved f