ed that I might fill them with fresh water. I also took
with me from the captain's cabin a small boat compass.

The heavy, sluggish, sodden movement of the hull advised me to make
haste. She was now barely lifting to the swell that came brimming in
broad liquid blue brows to her stem. It seemed as though another ton of
water would sink her; and if the swell fell over her bows and filled the
decks, down she would go. I had a small parcel of guineas in my chest,
and was about to fetch this money, when a sort of staggering sensation
in the upward slide of the hull gave me a fright, and, watching my
chance, I jumped into the boat and cast the line that held her adrift.

The sun was an hour above the horizon. The sea was a deep blue, heaving
very slowly, though you felt the weight of the mighty ocean in every
fold; and eastwards, the shoulders of the swell, catching the glorious
reflection of the sun, hurled the splendour along, till all that quarter
of the sea looked to be a mass of leaping dazzle. Upon the eastern
sea-line lay a range of white clouds, compact as the chalk cliffs of
Dover; threads, crescents, feather-shapes of vapour of the daintiest
sort, shot with pearly lustre, floated overhead very high. It was in
truth a fair and pleasant morning--of an icy coldness indeed, but the
air being dry, its shrewdness was endurable. Yet was it a brightness to
fill me with anguish by obliging me to reflect how it would have been
with us had it dawned yesterday instead of to-day. My companions would
have been alive, and yonder sinking ruined fabric a trim ship capable of
bearing us stoutly into warm seas and to our homes at last.

I threw the oar over the stern of the boat to keep her near to the brig,
not so much because I desired to see the last of her, as because of the
shrinking of my soul within me from the thought of heading in my
loneliness into those prodigious leagues of ocean which lay stretched
under the sky. Whilst the hull floated she was something to hold on to,
so to say, something for the eye amid the vastness of water to rest
upon, something to take out of the insufferable feeling of solitude the
poisonous sting of conviction.

But her end was at hand. I had risen to step the boat's mast, and was
standing and grasping it whilst I directed a slow look round the horizon
in God knows what vain hope of beholding a sail, when my eye coming to
the brig, I observed that she was sinking. She went down very slowly;
t