dows even formed part of that phantom-fire.

The sailors of the Channel are familiar with those indescribable
phosphorescences, full of warning for the navigator. They are nowhere
more surprising than in the "Great V," near Isigny.

By this light, surrounding objects lose their reality. A spectral
glimmer renders them, as it were, transparent. Rocks become no more
than outlines. Cables of anchors look like iron bars heated to a white
heat. The nets of the fishermen beneath the water seem webs of fire. The
half of the oar above the waves is dark as ebony, the rest in the sea
like silver. The drops from the blades uplifted from the water fall in
starry showers upon the sea. Every boat leaves a furrow behind it like a
comet's tail. The sailors, wet and luminous, seem like men in flames. If
you plunge a hand into the water, you withdraw it clothed in flame. The
flame is dead, and is not felt. Your arm becomes a firebrand. You see
the forms of things in the sea roll beneath the waves as in liquid fire.
The foam twinkles. The fish are tongues of fire, or fragments of the
forked lightning, moving in the depths.

The reflection of this brightness had passed over the closed eyelids of
Gilliatt in the sloop. It was this that had awakened him.

His awakening was opportune.

The ebb tide had run out, and the waters were beginning to rise again.
The funnel, which had become disengaged during his sleep, was about to
enter again into the yawning hollow above it.

It was rising slowly.

A rise of another foot would have entangled it in the wreck again. A
rise of one foot is equivalent to half-an-hour's tide. If he intended,
therefore, to take advantage of that temporary deliverance once more
within his reach, he had just half-an-hour before him.

He leaped to his feet.

Urgent as the situation was, he stood for a few moments meditative,
contemplating the phosphorescence of the waves.

Gilliatt knew the sea in all its phases. Notwithstanding all her tricks,
and often as he had suffered from her terrors, he had long been her
companion. That mysterious entity which we call the ocean had nothing in
its secret thoughts which he could not divine. Observation, meditation,
and solitude, had given him a quick perception of coming changes, of
wind, or cloud, or wave.

Gilliatt hastened to the top ropes and payed out some cable; then being
no longer held fast by the anchors, he seized the boat-hook of the
sloop, and pushed her toward