ome transformation
from the heat, some culinary process, through which it was to be
rendered unfit for human lips to breathe. Birds flew low and heavily
around the raft, as though their wings met such resistance as fish find
in water, alighting occasionally to pick up languidly morsels of
rejected food.

Still the old negro's crooning hymns went on, recommenced with morning
light. To my sad heart, the refrain bore a mournful significance:

"In the land of the New Jerusalem
There shall be no more sea."

She sat, a wrinkled hag, with a leering, repulsive face, with her feet
planted firmly on her mattress, her knees elevated, her long, ape-like
arms closely embracing these--her fingers, strung with brass and silver
rings, intertwined with snake-like flexibility.

On her head was the inevitable bright-colored handkerchief, the badge of
her race, or rather of her condition in those days, and she wore the
decent, blue-cotton frock, which marked her for a plantation-negro.
Large hoops were in her flat, enormous ears, that seemed to suspend her
shoulders as they touched them, drawn up and narrowed as these were,
even beyond their natural hideousness, by her attitude, one which she
maintained as stolidly as a dervish.

"You must help us," I said, at last, when the crisis came, and affairs
waxed desperate. "You must take the child, at least, and care for him.
See, it requires two persons to sustain his dying mother--one to wet her
lips, one--"

"'Deed, honey," she interrupted, coolly, "you must 'scuse me dis oncst;
I has jus' as much to do as I kin posomply 'complish, in keepin' of
myself dry, comfable, and singin' ob my hyme-toones. We has all to take
our chances dis time, an' do for our own selves, black and white; an' I
don't see none ob my own white folks on dis raf', wich I is mighty proud
of. Dar, now! I does b'leve dat is a ship sail way off dar. Does you see
it, honey?"

And she pointed to a large white gull, skimming the main at some
distance. Disgusted with her selfishness, I vouchsafed her no farther
notice at the time, and her crooning went on during the whole period of
the bitter death-struggle of that poor sufferer, whose name I never
knew, but whose little, deformed waif, the orphan of the raft, remained
my heritage.

"You will take care of him," she had said to me, in her last conscious
moments, "my baby-boy, my little--" the name died on her lips, and she
never spoke again.

When she was dead, Ch