He was right. When I reflected, I was quite sure I could not, in my exhausted state, be able to handle one of the big oars for even five minutes at a stretch; and, admitting that I had been strong enough to row for a couple of hours, yet the result to have been obtained could not have been important enough to justify the serious labor.

The steward all this time sat pertestly quiet in the bottom of the boat, with his back against the mast. He paid no attention to us when we spoke, nor looked around him, though sometimes he would fix his eyes vacantly on the sky as if his shattered mind found relief in contemplating the void. I was heartily glad to find him quiet, though I took care to watch him, for it was difficult to tell whether his imbecility was not counterfeited, by his madness, to throw us off our guard, and furnish him with an opportunity to play us and himself some deadly trick.

As some hours had elapsed since we had tasted food, I opened a tin of meat and prepared a meal. The boatswain ate heartily, and so did the steward; but I could not prevail upon Mary to take more than a biscuit and sherry and water.

Indeed, as the evening approached, our position affected her more deeply, and often, after she had cast her eyes toward the horizon, I would see her lips whispering a prayer, and feel her hand tightening on mine.

The ship still floated, but she was so low in the water that I every minute expected to see her vanish. The water was above her main-chains, and I could only attribute her obstinacy in not sinking to the great quantity of wood - both in cases and goods which composed her cargo.

The sun was now quite close to the horizon, branding the ocean with a purple glare, but itself descending into a cloudless sky. I can not express how majestic and wonderful the great orb looked to us who were almost level with the water. Its disk seemed vaster than I had ever before seen it, and there was something sublimely solemn in the loneliness of its descent. All the sky about it, and far to the south and north, was changed into the color of gold by its lustre; and over our heads the heavens were an exquisite tender green, which melted in the east into a dark blue.

I was telling Mary that ere the sun sunk again we might be on board a ship, and whispering any words of encouragement and hope to her, when I was startled by the boatswain crying, "Now she's gone! Look at her!"

I turned my eyes toward the ship, and could scarcely credit my senses when I found that her hull had vanished, and that nothing was to be seen of her but her spars, which were all aslant sternward.

I held my breath as I saw the masts sink lower and lower. First the cross-jack yard was submerged, the gaff with the ensign hanging dead at the peak, then the mainyard; presently only the maintop-mast cross-trees were visible, a dark cross upon the water; they vanished. At the same moment the sun disappeared behind the horizon; and now we were alone on the great, breathing deep, with all the eastern sky growing dark as we watched.

"It's all over!" said the boatswain, breaking the silence, and speaking in a hollow tone. "No livin' man 'll ever see the Grosvenor' again!"

Mary shivered and leaned against me. I took up a rug and folded it round her, and kissed her forehead.

The boatswain had turned his back upon us, and sat with his hands folded, I believe in prayer. I am sure he was thinking of Jim Cornish, and I would not have interrupted that honest heart's communion with its Maker for the value of the ship that had sunk.

Darkness came down very quickly, and, that we might lose no chance of being seen by any distant vessel, I lighted the ship's lantern and hoisted it at the mast-head. I also lighted the bull's-eye lamp and set it in the stern-sheets.

"Mary," I whispered, "I will make you up a bed in the bottom of the boat. While this weather lasts, dearest, we have no cause to be alarmed by our position. It will make me happy to see you sleeping, and be sure that while you sleep there will be watchful eyes near you.”

"I will sleep as I am here, by your side; I shall rest better so," she answered. "I could not sleep lying down."

It was too sweet a privilege to forego; I passed my arm around her and held her close to me; and she closed her eyes like a child, to please me.

Worn out as I was, enfeebled both intellectually and physically by the heavy strain that had been put upon me ever since that day when I had been ironed by Captain Coxon's orders, I say and I solemnly believe in the truth of what I am about to write that had it not been for the living reality of this girl, encircled by my arm, with her head supported by my shoulder;

had it not been for the deep love I felt for her, which localized my thoughts, and, so to say, humanized them down to the level of our situation, forbidding them to trespass beyond the prosaic limits of our danger, of the precautions to be taken by us, of our chances of rescue, of the course to be steered when the wind should fill our sail I should have gone mad when the night came down upon the sea and enveloped our boat (a lonely speck on the gigantic world of water) in the mystery and fear of the darkness. I know this by recalling the fancy that for a few moments possessed me in looking along the water, when I clearly beheld the outline of a coast, with innumerable lights winking upon it; by the whirling, dizzy sensation in my head which followed the extinction of the vision; by the emotion of wild horror and unutterable disappointment which overcame me when I detected the cheat. I pressed my darling to me, and looked upon her sweet face, revealed by the light shed by the lantern at the mast-head, and all my misery left me; and the delight which the knowledge that she was my own love, and that I held her in my arms, gave me, fell like an exorcism upon the demons of my stricken imagination.

She smiled when I pressed her to my side, and when she saw my face close to hers, looking at her; but she did not know that she had saved me from a fate more dreadful than death, and that I so strong as I seemed, so earnest as I had shown myself in my conflicts with fate, so resolutely as I had striven to comfort her had been rescued from madness by her whom I had a thousand times pitied for her helplessness.

She fell asleep at last, and I sat for nearly two hours motionless, that I should not awaken her. The steward slept with his head in his arms, kneeling-a strange, mad posture. The boatswain sat forward, with his face turned aft and his arms folded. I addressed him once, but he did not answer. Probably I spoke too low for him to hear, being fearful of waking Mary; but there was little we had to say. Doubtless he found his thoughts too engrossing to suffer him to talk.

Being anxious to "take a star," as we say at sea, and not knowing how the time went, I gently drew out my watch and found the hour a quarter to eleven. In replacing the watch I aroused Mary, who raised her head and looked round her with eyes that flashed in the lantern light.

"Where are we ?" she exclaimed, and bent her head to gaze at me, on which she recollected herself. "Poor boy!" she said,

taking my hand, "I have kept you supporting my weight. You were more tired than I. But it is your turn now. Rest your

head on my shoulder."

"No, it is still your turn," I answered, "and you shall sleep again presently. But since you are awake, I will try to find out where we are. You shall hold the lamp for me while I make my calculations and examine the chart."

Saying which, I drew out my sextant and got across the thwarts to the mast, which I stood up alongside of to lean on; for the swell, though moderate enough to pass without notice on a big vessel, lifted and sunk the boat in such a way as to make it difficult to stand steady.

I was in the act of raising the sextant to my eye, when the boatswain suddenly cried, "Mr. Royle, listen!"

"What do you hear?" I asked.

"Hush! listen now!" he answered, in a breathless voice.

I strained my ear, but nothing was audible to me but the wash of the water against the boat's side.

"Don't you hear it, Mr. Royle?" he cried, in a kind of agony, holding up his finger. "Miss Robertson, don't you hear something?"

There was another interval of silence, and Mary answered: "I hear a kind of throbbing."

"It is so!" I exclaimed.

of a steamer!"

"I hear it now! it is the engines

"A steamer? Yes! I heard it! where is she!" shouted the boatswain, and he jumped on to the thwart on which I stood. We strained our ears again.

That throbbing sound, as Mary had accurately described it, closely resembling the rhythmical running of a locomotive-engine heard in the country on a silent night at a long distance, was now distinctly audible; but so smooth was the water, so breathless the night, that it was impossible to tell how far away the vessel might be; for so fine and delicate a vehicle of sound is the ocean in a calm, that, though the hull of a steamship might be below the horizon, yet the thumping of her engines would be heard.

Once more we inclined our ears, holding our breath as we listened.

"It grows louder!" cried the boatswain. "Mr. Royle, bend your bull's-eye lamp to the end o' one o' the oars and swing it about, while I dip this mast-head lantern."

Very different was his manner now from what it had been that morning when the Russian hove in sight.

I lashed the lamp by the ring of it to an oar and waved it to and fro. Meanwhile the boatswain had got hold of the masthead halyards, and was running the big ship's lantern up and down the mast.

"Mary," I exclaimed, "lift up the seat behind you, and in the left-hand corner you will find a pistol."

"I have it," she answered, in a few moments. "Point it over the stern and fire!" I cried.

She leveled the little weapon and pulled the trigger; the white flame leaped, and a smart report followed.

"Listen now!" I said.

I held the oar steady, and the boatswain ceased to dance the lantern. For the first few seconds I heard nothing, then my ear caught the throbbing sound.

"I see her!" cried the boatswain; and, following his finger (my sight being keener than my hearing), I saw not only the shadow of a vessel down in the southwest, but the smoke from her funnel pouring along the stars.

"Mary," I cried, "fire again!" She drew the trigger.

"Again!"

The clear report whizzed like a bullet past my ear.

Simultaneously with the second report a ball of blue fire shot

up into the sky. Another followed, and another.

A moment after a red light shone clear upon the sea.

"She sees us!" I cried. "God be praised! Mary, darling, she sees us!"

I waved the lamp furiously. But there was no need to wave it any longer. The red light drew nearer and nearer; the throbbing of the engines louder and louder, and the revolutions of the propeller sounded like a pulse beating through the water. The shadow broadened and loomed larger. I could hear the water spouting out of her side and the blowing off of the safetyvalve.

Soon the vessel grew a defined shape against the stars, and then a voice, thinned by the distance, shouted, "What light is that?"

I cried to the boatswain: "Answer, for God's sake! My voice is weak."

He hollowed his hands and roared back: "We're ship wrecked seamen adrift in a quarter-boat!"