un warmed the upper part of me, and I essayed to drag my
dead legs out of the water, if perchance they might be warmed back to life
also. They came back in time, with horrible pricking pains and cramps which
I could only suffer, lest I should roll off into the water. And if I had, I
am not at all sure that I would have struggled further, so weary and broken
had the night left me.

All that day I lay on my spar, warmed into meagre life by the sun, and
tortured at first with the angry clamour of an empty stomach, for it was
full twenty hours since I had eaten, and the wear and tear alone would have
needed very full supplies to make good. But in time the bitter hunger gave
place to a sick emptiness which I essayed to stay by chewing bits of
floating seaweed. And this, and the drying of my body by the sun, brought
on a furious thirst, to which the sparkling water that broke against my
spar proved a most horrible temptation. So torturing was it in the
afternoon that the sodden cold of the night now seemed as nothing in
comparison, and to relieve it I dropped my body into the water to soak
again.

Not a sail did I see that whole day, but being so low in the water my range
was of course very limited. In the times when I could get away for a moment
or two from my hunger and thirst, my thoughts ran horribly on the previous
day's happenings--those hurtling iron flails against which we were
powerless--that little round hole that bored itself in John Ozanne's
forehead--that cold-blooded shooting of drowning men--the monstrous
brutality of it all! What little blood was in me, and cold as that was,
surged up into my head at the recollection, and set me swaying on my perch.

And then my thoughts wandered off to the poor souls in Peter Port,
hopefully speculating on the luck we were like to have, counting on the
return of those whose broken bodies were dredging the bottom below me,--to
the shocking completeness of our disasters. Truly when it all came back on
me like that I felt inclined at times to loose my hold and have done with
life. And then the thought of Carette, and my mother, and my grandfather,
and Krok, would brace me to further precarious clinging with a warming of
the heart, but chiefly the thought of Carette, and the good-bye she had
waved to me from the point of Brecqhou.

I might, perhaps, with reason have remembered that what had happened to us
was but one of the natural results of warfare--barring, of course, the
m