"In what remained of the rain-water (with the slow oscillations of the boat it swashed about and left deposits of slime on her boards) I caught from time to time glimpses of my face as affected by starvation. And it may interest you to know that it was not the leanness of my face that appalled me but the wickedness of it. All the sins I had ever sinned, all the lies I had told, all the meannesses I had done, the drunks I had been on, the lusts I had sated, came back to me from the bilge-water. And I knew that if I died then and there I should go straight to hell if there was one. I made divers trials at repentance but was not able to concentrate my mind upon them. I could see but one hope of salvation--to die as I had not lived--like a gentleman. It was not a voluminous duty, owing to the limits set upon conduct by the situation, but it was obvious. Whatever pangs I should experience in the stages of dissolution, I must spare Polly.
"In view of what occurred it is sufficiently obvious that I read my duty wrongly. For, when I was encouraging myself to spare the bird I should rather have been planning to save her. She, too, must have been suffering frightfully from the long-continued lack of her customary diet, but it seems that while enduring it she was scheming to save me.
"She had been sitting disconsolately on the gunwale when the means struck suddenly into her tortuously working mind and acted upon her demeanor like a sight of sunflower seeds, of which she was prodigiously fond. If I follow her reasoning correctly it was this. The man who has been so nice to me needs food. He can't find it for himself; therefore I must find it for him. Thus far she reasoned. And then, unfortunately, trusting too much to a generous instinct, and disregarding the most obvious and simple calculation, she omitted the act of turning around, and instead of laying the egg that was to save me in the boat, she laid it in the ocean. It sank."
Long voyages make for dulness. I had listened to the above narrative with so much interest as to lose for a moment my sense of what was patent. In the same absurd way that one man says to another whom he knows perfectly well, "What--is this you?" I said to Leslie very eagerly, "Were you saved?" And he answered, "No; we were both drowned."