e more as her yards swung round, and she stood on the other tack.

"Ay, ay," replied the man Forest, "she'll work dead to windward, and
then bear down on us. Why the devil didn't she find herself here away
yesterday?"

"What a store of memories the last few weeks have given us, Enrico,"
remarked Isabel, as she tore a strip of canvas to make a sling for the
wounded arm, which was becoming painful.

"So it ever is with our lives," answered Hughes, as the arm was made as
comfortable as possible. "Shadowy memories of sunshine and storm, ever
driving over the mirror in which we see the past; but the future,
dearest," and he pointed towards the pyramid of white canvas, "the
future will be our own."

"May God grant it, for we have been cruelly tried," answered Isabel.

Slipping slowly through the water, the whaler did exactly as the man
Forest predicted.

She was a dull sailer, and the time seemed long and weary to those who
watched her on board the raft with intense anxiety. So precarious had
been their late position, so changeable the events of their life, that
they could not believe in safety until they should actually feel its
existence.

The whaler was now dead to windward, and the raft still going slowly
through the water before the breeze. The two bodies, namely, those of
Captain Weber and the carpenter Morris, lay side by side amidships.

"Take the sail off her, my lads," said the mate, and he was obeyed with
ready alacrity, the canvas being stripped from the stump of a mast, and
thrown over the two corpses.

Paying round, the whaler wore, and slowly handling her loftier canvas,
her huge hull came rolling along, heading straight for the raft, her
crew shortening sail as they came on.

Slowly she neared it, and a score or more of men might be seen
clustering in her rigging, or gazing over her bulwarks at the strange
sight presented by the spars drifting along on the waves of the ocean.

"Raft, ahoy!" shouted a man, who was holding on in the mizen rigging of
the ship, "what raft is that?"

"The wreck of the brig `Halcyon,' lost in the late gale," replied the
mate, using his two hands as a trumpet.

"What was the meaning of the firing?" again shouted Captain Hawkins,
master of the whaler the "Dolphin," still misdoubting, for in those days
pirates were not unknown off the coast of Madagascar.

"Mutiny and murder," returned the mate, at the top of his voice, for all
reply.

"Avast, there! Mr Lowe," g