the after-part of the Long-boat all stooped
down together as my voice reached them.
They were lost to view for about a minute;
then appeared again—one man among them
was held up on his feet by the rest, and
he hailed back the blessed words (a very
faint hope went a very long way with people
in our desperate situation):

“Not yet!”

The relief felt by me, and by all with me,
when we knew that our captain, though
unfitted for duty, was not lost to us, it is not
in words—at least, not in such words as a
man like me can command—to express. I
did my best to cheer the men by telling them
what a good sign it was that we were not as
badly off yet as we had feared; and then
communicated what instructions I had to
give, to William Rames, who was to be left in
command in my place when I took charge of
the Long-boat. After that, there was nothing
to be done, but to wait for the chance of the
wind dropping at sunset, and the sea going
down afterwards, so as to enable our weak
crews to lay the two boats alongside of each
other, without undue risk—or, to put it
plainer, without saddling ourselves with the
necessity for any extraordinary exertion of
strength or skill. Both the one and the
other had now been starved out of us for
days and days together.

At sunset the wind suddenly dropped, but
the sea, which had been running high for so
long a time past, took hours after that before
it showed any signs of getting to rest. The
moon was shining, the sky was wonderfully
clear, and it could not have been, according
to my calculations, far off midnight, when the
long, slow, regular swell of the calming ocean
fairly set in, and I took the responsibility of
lessening the distance between the Long-boat
and ourselves.

It was, I dare say, a delusion of mine; but
I thought I had never seen the moon shine
so white and ghastly anywhere, either at sea
or on land, as she shone that night while we
were approaching our companions in misery.
When there was not much more than a boat’s
length between us, and the white light
streamed cold and clear over all our faces,
both crews rested on their oars with one
great shudder, and stared over the gunwale
of either boat, panic-stricken at the first sight
of each other.

“Any lives lost among you?” I asked, in
the midst of that frightful silence.

The men in the Long-boat, huddled together
like sheep at the sound of my voice.

“None yet, but the child, thanks be to
God!” answered one among them.

And at the sound of his voice, all my men
shrank together like the men in the Long-
boat. I was afraid to let the horror produced by
our first meeting at close quarters after the
dreadful changes that wet, cold, and famine
had produced, last one moment longer than
could be helped; so, without giving time for
anymore questions and answers, I commanded
the men to lay the two boats close alongside
of each other. When I rose up and
committed the tiller to the hands of Rames, all my
poor fellows raised their white faces imploringly
to mine. “Don't leave us, sir,” they
said, “don't leave us.” “I leave you,” says I,
“under the command and the guidance of
Mr. William Rames, as good a sailor as I am,
and as trusty and kind a man as ever stepped.
Do your duty by him, as you have done
it by me; and, remember, to the last, that
while there is life there is hope. God bless
and help you all!” With those words, I
collected what strength I had left, caught at
two arms that were held out to me, and so
got from the stern-sheets of one boat into the
stern-sheets of the other.

“Mind where you step, sir,” whispered
one of the men who had helped me into the
Long-boat. I looked down as he spoke.
Three figures were huddled up below me,
with the moonshine falling on them in ragged
streaks through the gaps between the men
standing or sitting above them. The first
face I made out was the face of Miss
Coleshaw, her eyes were wide open, and fixed
on me. She seemed still to keep her
senses, and, by the alternate parting and
closing of her lips, to be trying to speak, but
I could not hear that she uttered a single
word. On her shoulder rested the head of
Mrs. Atherfield. The mother of our poor
little Golden Lucy must, I think, have been
dreaming of the child she had lost; for there
was a faint smile just ruffling the white
stillness of her face, when I first saw it turned
upward, with peaceful closed eyes towards the
heavens. From her, I looked down a little,
and there, with his head on her lap, and with
one of her hands resting tenderly on his
cheek—there lay the Captain, to whose help
and guidance, up to this miserable time, we had
never looked in vain,—there, worn out at last
in our service, and for our sakes, lay the best
and bravest man of all our company. I stole
my hand in gently through his clothes and
laid it on his heart, and felt a little feeble
warmth over it, though my cold, dulled,
touch could not detect even the faintest beating.
The two men in the stern-sheets with
me, noticing what I was doing—knowing
I loved him like a brother—and seeing, I
suppose, more distress in my face than I
myself was conscious of its showing, lost
command over themselves altogether, and
burst into a piteous moaning, sobbing
lamentation over him. One of the two drew aside
a jacket from his feet, and showed me that
they were bare, except where a wet, ragged
strip of stocking still clung to one of them.
When the ship struck the Iceberg, he had
run on deck, leaving his shoes in his cabin.
All through the voyage in the boat his
feet had been unprotected; and not
a soul had discovered it until he dropped!
As long as he could keep his eyes open, the