d from peach-color
deepened to rose, he walked along the raft, and inspected the dead man.
He found it was a man of color, but not a black. The body was not kept
in its place, as he had supposed, merely by being jammed into the angle
caused by the rail; it was also lashed to the corner upright by a long,
stout belt. Staines concluded this had kept the body there, and its
companions had been swept away.

This was not lost on him: he removed the belt for his own use: he then
found it was not only a belt, but a receptacle; it was nearly full of
small, hard substances that felt like stones.

When he had taken it off the body, he felt a compunction. "Ought he to
rob the dead, and expose it to be swept into the sea at the first wave,
like a dead dog?"

He was about to replace the belt, when a middle course occurred to him.
He was a man who always carried certain useful little things about him,
viz., needles, thread, scissors, and string. He took a piece of string,
and easily secured this poor light skeleton to the raft. The belt he
strapped to the rail, and kept for his own need.

And now hunger gnawed him. No food was near. There was nothing but the
lovely sea and sky, mosaic with color, and that grim, ominous skeleton.

Hunger comes and goes many times before it becomes insupportable. All
that day and night, and the next day, he suffered its pangs; and then it
became torture, but the thirst maddening.

Towards night fell a gentle rain. He spread a handkerchief and caught
it. He sucked the handkerchief.

This revived him, and even allayed in some degree the pangs of hunger.

Next day was cloudless. A hot sun glared on his unprotected head, and
battered down his enfeebled frame.

He resisted as well as he could. He often dipped his head, and as often
the persistent sun, with cruel glare, made it smoke again.

Next day the same: but the strength to meet it was waning. He lay down
and thought of Rosa, and wept bitterly. He took the dead man's belt, and
lashed himself to the upright. That act, and his tears for his beloved,
were almost his last acts of perfect reason: for next day came the
delusions and the dreams that succeed when hunger ceases to torture,
and the vital powers begin to ebb. He lay and saw pleasant meadows with
meandering streams, and clusters of rich fruit that courted the hand and
melted in the mouth.

Ever and anon they vanished, and he saw grim death looking down on him
with those big cavernous