incredible tradition. In the afternoon I had seen his lean knees
totter under the captain's fire. Now, at midnight - the exact time
by my watch - it was as if his shrunken limbs had expanded in his
clothes; he seemed hardly to know his own flushed face, as he caught
sight of it in my mirror.

"By Jove!" said he, "this has put me in a fine old fever; but I
don't know when I felt in better fettle. If only they get it under!
I've not looked like this all the voyage."

And he admired himself while I dressed in hot haste: a fine young
fellow; not at all the natural egotist, but cast for death by the
doctors, and keenly incredulous in his bag of skin. It revived
one's confidence to hear him talk. But he forgot himself in an
instant, and gave me a lead through the saloon with a boyish
eagerness that made me actually suspicious as I ran. We were
nearing the Line. I recalled the excesses of my last crossing,
and I prepared for some vast hoax at the last moment. It was only
when we plunged upon the crowded quarter-deck, and my own eyes read
lust of life and dread of death in the starting eyes of others, that
such lust and such dread consumed me in my turn, so that my veins
seemed filled with fire and ice.

To be fair to those others, I think that the first wild panic was
subsiding even then; at least there was a lull, and even a reaction
in the right direction on the part of the males in the second class
and steerage. A huge Irishman at their head, they were passing
buckets towards the after-hold; the press of people hid the hatchway
from us until we gained the poop; but we heard the buckets spitting
and a hose-pipe hissing into the flames below; and we saw the column