ow is the plunder partitioned?" I asked.

"Everything is put into the common chest, as we call it, and brought to
the mast and sold by auction--Strange!" he cried, breaking off and
putting his hand to his brow. "I find my speech difficult. Do you notice
I halt and utter thickly?"

I replied, No; his voice seemed to be the same as hitherto.

"Yet I feel ill. Holy Mother of God, what is this feeling coming upon
me? O Jesus, how faint and dark!"

He half rose from his bench, but sat again, trembling as if the palsy
had seized him, and I noticed his head dotted with beads of sweat. He
had drunk so much wine and spirits throughout the day that a dram would
have been of no use to him.

I said, "I expect it will be the blow on the back of your head, when you
fell just now, that has produced this feeling of giddiness. Let me help
you to lie down" (for his mattress was on deck); "the sensation will
pass, I don't doubt."

If he heard he did not heed me, but fell a-muttering and crying to
himself. And now I did certainly remark a quality in his voice that was
new to my ear; it was not, as he had said, a labour or thickness of
utterance, but a dryness and parchedness of old age, with many breaks
from high to low notes, and a lean noise of dribbling threading every
word. He sweated and talked and muttered, but this was from sheer
terror; he did not swoon, but sat with a stoop, often pressing his brows
and gazing about him like one whose senses are all abroad.

"Gracious Mother of all angels!" he exclaimed, crossing himself several
times, but with a feeble, most agitated hand, and speaking in French and
English, and sometimes interjecting an invocation in Italian or Spanish,
though I give you what he said in my own tongue; "surely I am dying. O
Lord, how frightful to die! O holy Virgin, be merciful to me. I shall go
to hell--O Jesu, I am past forgiveness--for the love of heaven, Mr.
Rodney, some brandy! Oh that some saint would interpose for me! Only a
few years longer--grant me a few years longer--I beseech for time that I
may repent!" and he extended one quivering hand for the brandy (of which
a draught stood melted in the oven) and made the sign of the cross upon
his breast with the other, whilst he continued to whine out in his
cracked pipes the wildest appeals for mercy, saying a vast deal that I
durst not venture to set down, so plentiful and awful were his clamours
for time that he might repent, though he never lapsed i