growing tall once more. There was the space
of unburnt candle between the light and the
slow match shortened to an inch or less. How
much life did that inch leave me? Three-quarters
of an hour? Half an hour? Fifty minutes
Twenty minutes? Steady! an inch of tallow
candle would burn longer than twenty minutes.
An inch of tallow! the notion of a man's
body and soul being kept together by an inch of
tallow! Wonderful! Why, the greatest king
that sits on a throne can't keep a man's body
and soul together ; and here's an inch of tallow
that can do what the king can't! There's
something to tell mother, when I get home, which
will surprise her more than all the rest of my
voyages put together. I laughed inwardly,
again, at the thought of that ; and shook and
swelled and suffocated myself, till the light of
the candle leaped in through my eyes, and
licked up the laughter, and burnt it out of me,
and made me all empty, and cold, and quiet
once more.

Mother and Lizzie. I don't know when they
came back; but they did come back—not, as it
seemed to me, into my mind this time; but
right down bodily before me, in the hold of the
brig.

Yes: sure enough, there was Lizzie, just as light-
hearted as usual, laughing at me. Laughing! Well
why not? Who is to blame Lizzie for thinking
I'm lying on my back, drunk in the cellar, with
the beer barrels all round me? Steady! she's
crying now—spinning round and round in a
fiery mist, wringing her hands, screeching out
for help—fainter and fainter, like the splash of
the schooner's sweeps. Gone!—burnt up in
the fiery mist. Mist? fire? no: neither one
nor the other. It's mother makes the light—
mother knitting, with ten flaming points at the
ends of her fingers and thumbs, and slow-
matches hanging in bunches all round her face
instead of her own grey hair. Mother in her
old arm-chair, and the pilot's long skinny hands
hanging over the back of the chair, dripping
with gunpowder. No! no gunpowder, no chair,
no mother—nothing but the pilot's face, shining
red hot, like a sun, in the fiery mist; turning
upside down in the fiery mist; running
backwards and forwards along the slow-match, in
the fiery mist; spinning millions of miles in a
minute, in the fiery mist — spinning itself smaller
and smaller into one tiny point, and that
point darting on a sudden straight into my
head—and then, all fire and all mist—no
hearing, no seeing, no thinking, no feeling
—the brig, the sea, my own. self, the whole
world, all gone together!

After what I've just told you, I know
nothing and remember nothing, till I woke up,
as it seemed to me in a comfortable bed, with
two rough and ready men like myself sitting
on each side of my pillow, and a gentleman
standing watching me at the foot of the bed.
It was about seven in the morning. My sleep
(or what seemed like my sleep to me) had
lasted better than eight months—I was among
my own countrymen in the island of Trinidad
—the men at each side of my pillow were my
keepers, turn and turn about—and the gentleman
standing at the foot of the bed was the
doctor. What I said and did in those eight
months, I never have known and never shall.
I woke out of it, as if it had been one long sleep
—that's all I know.

It was another two months or more before
the doctor thought it safe to answer the
questions I asked him.

The brig had been anchored, just as I had
supposed, off a part of the coast which was lonely
enough to make the Spaniards pretty sure of no
interruption, so long as they managed their
murderous work quietly under cover of night.
My life had not been saved from the shore, but
from the sea. An American vessel, becalmed in
the offing, had made out the brig as the sun
rose; and the captain, having his time on his
hands in consequence of the calm, and seeing
a vessel anchored where no vessel had any reason
to be, had manned one of his boats and sent
his mate with it, to look a little closer into the
matter, and bring back a report of what he saw.
What he saw, when he and his men found the
brig deserted and boarded her, was a gleam of
candlelight through the chink in the hatchway.
The flame was within about a thread's breadth
of the slow-match, when he lowered himself into
the hold; and if he had not had the sense and
coolness to cut the match in two with his knife,
before he touched the candle, he and his men
might have been blown up along with the brig,
as well as me. The match caught and turned
into sputtering red fire, in the very act of
putting the candle out; and if the communication
with the powder barrel had not been cut off,
the Lord only knows what might have
happened.

What became of the Spanish schooner and
the pilot I have never heard from that day to
this. As for the brig, the Yankees took her, as
they took me, to Trinidad, and claimed their
salvage, and got it, I hope, for their own sakes.
I was landed just in the same state as when
they rescued me from the brig, that is to say,
clean out of my senses. But, please to remember
it was a long time ago; and, take my word
for it, I was discharged cured, as I have told
you. Bless your hearts, I'm all right now, as
you may see. I'm a little shaken by telling the
story, ladies and gentlemen — a little shaken,
that's all.