assing any which my troubled life
had known. Even now I experience great difficulty in relating the
matters which befell, in speaking of the sense of irrevocable loss
which came to me. Briefly, then, at about ten minutes before the
dining hour, whilst all the passengers, myself included, were below,
dressing, a faint cry arose from somewhere aft on the upper deck--a
cry which was swiftly taken up by other voices, so that presently a
deck-steward echoed it immediately outside my own stateroom:

"Man overboard! Man overboard!"

All my premonitions rallying in that one sickening moment, I sprang
out on the deck, half dressed as I was, and leaping past the boat
which swung nearly opposite my door, craned over the rail, looking
astern.

For a long time I could detect nothing unusual. The engine-room
telegraph was ringing--and the motion of the screws momentarily
ceased; then, in response to further ringing, recommenced, but so as
to jar the whole structure of the vessel; whereby I knew that the
engines were reversed. Peering intently into the wake of the ship, I
was but dimly aware of the ever-growing turmoil around me, of the
swift mustering of a boat's crew, of the shouted orders of the third
officer. Suddenly I saw it--the sight which was to haunt me for
succeeding days and nights.

Half in the streak of the wake and half out of it, I perceived the
sleeve of a white jacket, and, near to it, a soft felt hat. The sleeve
rose up once into clear view, seemed to describe a half-circle in the
air, then sank back again into the glassy swell of the water. Only the
hat remained floating upon the surface.

By the evidence of the white sleeve alone I might have remained
unconvinced, although upon the voyage I had become familiar enough
with the drill shooting-jacket, but the presence of the grey felt hat
was almost conclusive.

The man overboard was Nayland Smith!

I cannot hope, writing now, to convey in any words at my command, a
sense, even remote, of the utter loneliness which in that dreadful
moment closed coldly down upon me.

To spring overboard to the rescue was a natural impulse, but to have
obeyed it would have been worse than quixotic. In the first place, the
drowning man was close upon half a mile astern; in the second place,
others had seen the hat and the white coat as clearly as I; among them
the third officer, standing upright in the stern of the boat--which,
with commendable promptitude, had already been