Not a sail did I see that whole day, but being so low in the water my range
was of course very limited. In the times when I could get away for a moment
or two from my hunger and thirst, my thoughts ran horribly on the previous
day's happenings--those hurtling iron flails against which we were
powerless--that little round hole that bored itself in John Ozanne's
forehead--that cold-blooded shooting of drowning men--the monstrous
brutality of it all! What little blood was in me, and cold as that was,
surged up into my head at the recollection, and set me swaying on my perch.

And then my thoughts wandered off to the poor souls in Peter Port,
hopefully speculating on the luck we were like to have, counting on the
return of those whose broken bodies were dredging the bottom below me,--to
the shocking completeness of our disasters. Truly when it all came back on
me like that I felt inclined at times to loose my hold and have done with
life. And then the thought of Carette, and my mother, and my grandfather,
and Krok, would brace me to further precarious clinging with a warming of
the heart, but chiefly the thought of Carette, and the good-bye she had
waved to me from the point of Brecqhou.

I might, perhaps, with reason have remembered that what had happened to us
was but one of the natural results of warfare--barring, of course, the
murderous treatment of which no British seaman ever would be guilty. But I
did not. My thoughts ran wholly on the actual facts, and, as I have said,
faintly at times, but to my salvation, on Carette and home.

While the sun shone, and the masses of soft white cloud floated slowly
against the blue, hope still held me, if precariously at times. At midday,
indeed, the fierce bite of his rays on my bare back--for we had stripped
for the fight and I had on only my breeches and belt--combined with the