Among the survivors of a wreck are two bitter enemies. The parties,
having remained many days without food, cast lots to see who shall be
killed as food for the rest. The lot falls on one of the enemies. The
other may literally eat his heart!

* * * * *

_October 13._--During this moon, I have two or three evenings sat for
some time in our dining-room without light except from the coal fire and
the moon. Moonlight produces a very beautiful effect in the room,
falling so white upon the carpet, and showing its figures so distinctly,
and making all the room so visible, and yet so different from a morning
or noontide visibility. There are all the familiar things, every chair,
the tables, the couch, the bookcase, all that we are accustomed to see
in the daytime; but now it seems as if we were remembering them through
a lapse of years, rather than seeing them with the immediate eye. A
child's shoe, the doll, sitting in her little wicker-carriage, all
objects that have been used or played with during the day, though still
as familiar as ever, are invested with something like strangeness and
remoteness. I cannot in any measure express it. Then the somewhat dim
coal fire throws its unobtrusive tinge through the room,--a faint
ruddiness upon the wall,--which has a not unpleasant effect in taking
from the colder spirituality of the moonbeams. Between both these lights
such a medium is created that the room seems just fit for the ghosts of
persons very dear, who have lived in the room with us, to glide
noiselessly in and sit quietly down, without affrighting us. It would be
like a matter of course to look round and find some familiar form in one
of the chairs. If one of the white curtains happen to be drawn before
the windows, the moonlight makes a delicate tracery with the branches of
the trees, the leaves somewhat thinned by the progress of autumn, but