salting of the previous night and the dazzle of the dancing waves added
greatly to my discomfort. I felt like an insect under a burning glass, and
suffered much until I had the sense to slice a piece off my sail with my
knife and pull it over my raw shoulder bones. But when night fell again,
the chill waste of waters washed in on my soul and left me desolate and
hopeless, and I hardly hoped to see the dawn.

I remember little of the night, except that it was full of long-drawn agony
and seemed as if it would never end. But for the rope under my arms and the
loop of the sail, into which some time during the night I slipped, I must
have gone, and been lost.

In the morning the sun again woke what life was left in me. I had been
nearly forty-eight hours without food or drink, and strained on the edge
of death every moment of that time. It was but the remnant of a man that
lay like a rag across the spar, and he looked only for death, and yet by
instinct clung to life.

And when my weary eyes lifted themselves to look dully round, there, like a
white cloud of hope, came life pressing gloriously towards me--a pyramid of
snowy canvas, dazzling in the sunshine, the upper courses of a very large
ship.

She was still a great way off, but I could see down to her lower
foretop-gallant sail, and to my starting eyes she seemed to grow as I
watched her. She was coming my way, and I have little doubt that, in the
weakness of the moment and the sudden leap of hope when hope seemed dead, I
laughed and cried and behaved like a witless man. I know that I prayed God,
as I had never prayed in my life before, that she might keep her course and
come close enough for some sharp eye to see me.