ng in Grimalson's futile line. He brought
up the sinker.

"'God help us all!--there's hope yet!' he barked through his parched
throat, and held up the sinker all clothed about and clogged with
greenish-brown shore-weed."

NIGHT THE EIGHTEENTH.

"AND SO THEY CAME TO THE ISLAND . . ."

(Foe's Narrative Continued)

"That night, as I was steering, I heard a sound as of a bucket dipped
over the bows. Needless to say, we had hoisted no lantern on the
forestay since the night the other boats had driven away from us or
gone down. To help a vessel to pick us up on that expanse of water
it would have been about as useful as the tail of a glow-worm--and
moreover the crew _had drunk all the oil_.

"I had the sheet well out and was running under a light, lazy
night-waft of breeze. A thin moon was setting somewhere behind my
right shoulder, and the glimmer of it played on the canvas. . . .
I had supposed all the others to be sunk in merciful sleep, when
Webster stood up and, staggering forward, ducked under the foot of
the sail, which at once hid him from me. . . . When I heard the
_plunk_ of a bucket--as I supposed--it suggested at the worst that
here was another fool dosing himself mad on sea-water; and, as values
counted by this time, it was not worth while to awake four other
souls to consciousness and misery for the sake of preventing him.
. . . And then the man's face went swimming past me, upturned to the
moonlight, momentarily sinking as I grabbed at his beard which
floated up like seaweed. . . . I grabbed, and missed. God knows what
I should have done had my fingers tangled themselves in that beard,
to get a clutch on it.

"He had slipped himself overboard, to drown quietly. . . . And we
were now five, and Prout was plainly a dying man. (I'd have you
note, Roddy, the order in which the men on board went; for it rather
curiously backs up my theory that there's ever so much more vitality
in what we call brains than in what we call physique.) Martinez was
a weakling, of poor breed: Grimalson, big as bull's beef, had a brain
rotten as a pear: Webster, a docile fellow, was strong as Hercules
and surprisingly stupid. These were gone, in their order.
The two A.B.'s, Jarvis and Prout--canny men, resourceful, full of
seamanship--survived, and we three passengers. What kept Farrell
going, and saved his reason, was a great capacity for sleep.
He slept all the night and most of the day; and though by consequenc