t my only hope of
deliverance lay in being picked up; and that, though by heading east I
should be clinging to the stormy parts, I was more likely to meet with a
ship hereabouts than by sailing into the great desolation of the
north-west. The burden of my loneliness weighed down upon me so
crushingly that I cannot but consider my senses must have been somewhat
dulled by suffering, for had they been active to their old accustomed
height, I am persuaded my heart must have broken and that I should have
died of grief.

Faintly as the wind blew, it speedily wafted me out of sight of the
floating relics of the wreck, and then all was bare, bald, swelling sea
and empearled sky, darkening in lagoons of azure down to the soft
mountainous masses of white vapour lying like the coast of a continent
on the larboard horizon. But one living thing there was besides myself:
a grey-breasted albatross, of a princely width of pinion. I had not
observed it till the hull went down, and then, lifting my eyes with
involuntary sympathy in the direction pointed to by the upraised arms of
the sailor, I observed the great royal bird hanging like a shape of
marble directly over the frothing eddies. It was as though the spirit of
the deep had taken form in the substance of the noblest of all the fowls
of its dominions, and, poised on tremorless wings, was surveying with
the cold curiosity of an intelligence empty of human emotion the
destruction of one of those fabrics whose unequal contests and repeated
triumphs had provoked its haughty surprise. The bird quitted the spot of
the wreck after a while and followed me. Its eyes had the sparkling
blood-red gleam of rubies. It was as silent as a phantom, and with
arched neck and motionless plumes seemed to watch me with an
earnestness that presently grew insufferable. So far from finding any
comfort of companionship in the creature, methought if it did not
speedily break from the motionless posture in which it rested on its
seat of air, and remove its piercing gaze, it would end in crazing me. I
felt a sudden rage, and, jumping up, shouted and shook my fist at it.
This frightened the thing. It uttered a strange salt cry--the very note
of a gust of wind splitting upon a rope--flapped its wings, and after a
turn or two sailed away into the north.

I watched it till its figure melted into the blue atmosphere, and then
sank trembling into the sternsheets of the boat.

CHAPTER V.

I SIGHT A WHITE C