"I feel that I am quite in your way, my lads--a useless hand aboard, to consume your food and water, replied Hislop, faintly.
"Why, sir," said Probart, the stroke-oarsman, "you don't think we could have left you to burn in the poor old brig?"
"No, not exactly; still, I am of no use to you, and I feel----"
"Heart sick and despairing," moaned Hislop letting his chin drop on his breast.
"Don't talk so, sir," said Lambourne, stoutly; "despair never found a place in the heart of a British sailor!"
"You are right, Tom; and perhaps I'll gather headway, and get to windward yet."
"Of course you will," replied Tom, cheerfully; "but here's a sea coming--together, lads--pull together!"
Despair might well have found a place in all our breasts at that awful crisis; but Tom's bluff and cheerful way prevented our hearts from sinking, though the hours of that awful night seemed dark and long.
Well, without compass, chart, or quadrant, there we were, ten in number, in an open boat, tossing upon a dark and stormy sea, enveloped in clouds, with the red lightning gleaming through their ragged openings, or at the far and flat horizon--ignorant of where we were, where to steer for, or what to do, and full of terrible anticipations for the _future_!
My heart was full of horror, grief, and vague alarm, when I thought of my home--the quiet, the happy, and peaceful old Rectory, with all who loved me there, and whom I might never see again.
The hot tears that started to my eyes mingled with the cold spray that drenched my cheeks, and there seemed but one consolation for me, that my father, my affectionate and gentle mother and sisters, dear Dot and little Sybil, could never know all I had endured, or how I perished by hunger or drowning, if such were to be my fate.
All the stories I had heard or read of shipwrecked men--their sufferings, their endurance of gnawing hunger and burning thirst, their cannibalism, their mortal struggles with their dearest friends for the _last_ morsel of food, for the _last_ drop of water, and how the weak perished that the strong might live--crowded upon my memory to augment the real terrors of our situation.
So suddenly had this final catastrophe come upon us that we had considerable difficulty in assuring ourselves of its reality, and that it was not a dream--a dream, alas! from which there might be no awaking.