colors sweet and vivid, and the tranquil, rippling sea, peach-colored to
the horizon, with lines of diamonds where the myriad ripples broke into
smiles.

Staines was asleep, exhausted. Soon the light awoke him, and he looked
up. What an incongruous picture met his eye: that heaven of color
all above and around, and right before him, like a devil stuck in
mid-heaven, that grinning corpse, whose fate foreshadowed his own.

But daylight is a great strengthener of the nerves; the figure no longer
appalled him--a man who had long learned to look with Science's calm
eye upon the dead. When the sea became like glass, and from peach-color
deepened to rose, he walked along the raft, and inspected the dead man.
He found it was a man of color, but not a black. The body was not kept
in its place, as he had supposed, merely by being jammed into the angle
caused by the rail; it was also lashed to the corner upright by a long,
stout belt. Staines concluded this had kept the body there, and its
companions had been swept away.

This was not lost on him: he removed the belt for his own use: he then
found it was not only a belt, but a receptacle; it was nearly full of
small, hard substances that felt like stones.

When he had taken it off the body, he felt a compunction. "Ought he to
rob the dead, and expose it to be swept into the sea at the first wave,
like a dead dog?"

He was about to replace the belt, when a middle course occurred to him.
He was a man who always carried certain useful little things about him,
viz., needles, thread, scissors, and string. He took a piece of string,