Ever and anon they vanished, and he saw grim death looking down on him
with those big cavernous eyes.

By and by, whether his body's eye saw the grim skeleton, or his mind's
eye the juicy fruits, green meadows, and pearly brooks, all was shadowy.

So, in a placid calm, beneath a blue sky, the raft drifted dead, with
its dead freight, upon the glassy purple, and he drifted, too, towards
the world unknown.

There came across the waters to that dismal raft a thing none too
common, by sea or land--a good man.

He was tall, stalwart, bronzed, and had hair like snow, before his time,
for he had known trouble. He commanded a merchant steamer, bound for
Calcutta, on the old route.

The man at the mast-head descried a floating wreck, and hailed the
deck accordingly. The captain altered his course without one moment's
hesitation, and brought up alongside, lowered a boat, and brought the
dead, and the breathing man, on board.

A young middy lifted Staines in his arms from the wreck to the boat; he
whose person I described in chapter one weighed now no more than that.

Men are not always rougher than women. Their strength and nerve enable
them now and then to be gentler than buttery-fingered angels, who drop
frail things through sensitive agitation, and break them. These rough
men saw Staines was hovering between life and death, and they handled
him like a thing the ebbing life might be shaken out of in a moment. It