though they never would stop.

Ah! how I thought of her as that cruel day's most cruel sun
climbed higher and higher in the flawless flaming vault. A
pocket-handkerchief of all things had remained in my trousers pocket
through fire and water; I knotted it on the old childish plan, and
kept it ever drenched upon the head that had its own fever to endure
as well. Eva Denison! Eva Denison! I was talking to her in the
past, I was talking to her in the future, and oh! how different
were the words, the tone! Yes, I hated myself for having forgotten
her; but I hated God for having given her back to my tortured brain;
it made life so many thousandfold more sweet, and death so many
thousandfold more bitter.

She was saved in the gig. Sweet Jesus, thanks for that! But I - I
was dying a lingering death in mid-ocean; she would never know how
I loved her, I, who could only lecture her when I had her at my side.

Dying? No - no - not yet! I must live - live - live - to tell my
darling how I had loved her all the time. So I forced myself from
my lethargy of despair and grief; and this thought, the sweetest
thought of all my life, may or may not have been my unrealized
stimulus ere now; it was in very deed my most conscious and perpetual
spur henceforth until the end.

>From this onward, while my sense stood by me, I was practical,
resourceful, alert. It was now high-noon, and I had eaten nothing
since dinner the night before. How clearly I saw the long saloon
table, only laid, however, abaft the mast; the glittering glass,
the cool white napery, the poor old dried dessert in the green