n is
of sadness, as if for the loss of an old shipmate; the Malay looks on
with the impassive tranquillity peculiar to his race; while in the
sunken orbs of the nondescript can be detected a look that speaks of a
horrible craving--the craving of cannibalism.

The scene described, and the circumstances which have led to it, call
for explanation. It is easily given. The tall dark-bearded man is
Captain Robert Redwood, the skipper of an American merchant-vessel, for
some time trading among the islands of the Indian Archipelago. The
Irishman is his ship-carpenter, the Malay his pilot, while the others
are two common sailors of his crew. The boy and girl are his children,
who, having no mother or near relatives at home, have been brought along
with him on his trading voyage to the Eastern Isles. The vessel passing
from Manilla, in the Philippines, to the Dutch settlement of Macassar,
in the island of Celebes, has been caught in a _typhoon_ and swamped
near the middle of the Celebes Sea; her crew have escaped in a boat--the
pinnace--but saved from death by drowning only to find, most of them,
the same watery grave after long-procrastinated suffering from thirst,
from hunger, from all the agonies of starvation.

One after another have they succumbed, and been thrown overboard, until
the survivors are only six in number. And these are but skeletons, each
looking as if another day, or even another hour, might terminate his
wretched existence.

It may seem strange that the youthful pair in the stern-sheets, still
but tender children, and the girl more especially, should have withstood
the terrible suffering beyond a period possible to many strong men,
tough sailors every one of them. But it is not so strange after all, or
rather after knowing that, in the struggle with starvation, youth always
proves itself superior to age, and tender childhood will live on where
manhood gives way to the weakness of inanition.

That Captain Redwood is himself one of the strongest of the survivors
may be due partly to the fact of his having a higher organism than that
of his ship-comrades. But, no doubt, he is also sustained by the
presence of the two children, his affection for them and fear for their
fate warding off despair, and so strengthening within him the principle
of vitality.

If affection has aught to do with preserving life, it is strong enough
in the Irishman to account also for the preservation of his; for
although but