more
likely I might be run down, and with the thought I seemed to see a
black, towering cut-water rush foaming from the oily smother, to crash
into my little craft and bear me down drowning and battered beneath the
grim iron keel.

Time went by; it must have been hours--to me it seemed years. In the
overwhelming unearthly blackness of the fog I sat and shivered, a prey
to the most unutterably helpless feeling. If it were only daylight, and
the fog would lift, I should be picked up in no time in so congested a
waterway as the Channel was at this point. But such a consideration now
only served to enhance the horror of the position, for it wanted hours
and hours to daylight, and here I was, with no means of showing a light
except a matchbox containing some dozen and a half of wax vestas, and
right in the way of anything that came along. That was an idea anyhow.
I might light a pipe. The glow, tiny as it was, might attract notice in
the dark. But though a greater smoker than the average I am not one of
those who can enjoy tobacco on an empty stomach, and the latter
condition being all there, I soon had to desist, and think of the cosy
dinner we should now long since have been sitting down to, Bindley and
I, in the snug inn at Whiddlecombe Regis; which, whether it lay north,
south, east or west of me at that moment, Heaven only knew.

It may be guessed I had expended a good deal of lung power in periodical
shouting. I had heard fog-horns whooping from time to time, but more or
less distant, and once I had heard the powerful beat of a propeller and
the rush of a great liner, quite near by. But as Fate would have it, at
that critical point I had shouted myself well-nigh voiceless, and the
clank and clatter on board and the wash of her way must have drowned my
feeble attempts, for she passed on, and presently a succession of waves
furrowed up by her passage caused my little cockleshell to dance in the
most lively fashion. Thus I was left alone in the blackness once more,
sick and faint with hunger, and my teeth chattering with the cold, to
such an extent that it seemed to me the very noise they made ought in
itself to attract the attention of passing craft.

After that I seemed to fall into a state of semi-somnolence for a time,
out of which I was roused by the motion of the boat. I awoke with a
start. There was a freshening in the air, as though a breeze were
springing up; and indeed such was the case. The fog,