come to feel an overpowering dislike towards any other form of activity
whatever. He was not scared; he knew this because, firmly believing he
would never see another sunrise, he remained calm in that belief.

These are the moments of do-nothing heroics to which even good men
surrender at times. Many officers of ships can no doubt recall a case
in their experience when just such a trance of confounded stoicism would
come all at once over a whole ship's company. Jukes, however, had
no wide experience of men or storms. He conceived himself to be
calm--inexorably calm; but as a matter of fact he was daunted; not
abjectly, but only so far as a decent man may, without becoming
loathsome to himself.

It was rather like a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long
stress of a gale does it; the suspense of the interminably culminating
catastrophe; and there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to
existence within the excessive tumult; a searching and insidious fatigue
that penetrates deep into a man's breast to cast down and sadden his
heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of the earth--even
before life itself--aspires to peace.

Jukes was benumbed much more than he supposed. He held on--very wet,
very cold, stiff in every limb; and in a momentary hallucination of
swift visions (it is said that a drowning man thus reviews all his life)
he beheld all sorts of memories altogether unconnected with his present
situation. He remembered his father, for instance: a worthy business
man, who at an unfortunate crisis in his affairs went quietly to bed
and died forthwith in a state of resignation. Jukes did not recall these
circumstances, of course, but remaining otherwise unconcerned he seemed
to see distinctly the poor man's face; a certain game of nap played when