Days and weeks dragged on. When the captain would waken from his sleep,--which was not always at night, however, for the nights were miserably cold and sleepless,--when he wakened he would call the roll. Perhaps some one made no answer; then he would reach forth and touch the speechless body and find it dead. He had not strength now to bury the corpses in the sea's sepulchre; he had not strength even to partake of the unholy feast of the inanimate flesh. He lay there in the midst of pestilence; and at night, under the merciful veil of darkness, the fowls of the air gathered about him and bore away their trophy of corruption.
By-and-by there were but two left of all that suffering crew,--the captain and the boy,--and these two clung together like ghosts, defying mortality. They strove to be patient and hopeful: if they could not eat, they could drink, for the nights were dewy, and sometimes a mist covered them, a mist so dense it seemed almost to drip from the rags that poorly sheltered them. A cord was attached to the shrouds, the end of it carefully laid in the mouth of a bottle slung in the rigging. Down the thin cord slid occasional drops; one by one they stole into the bottle, and by morning there was a spoonful of water to moisten those parched lips,--sweet, crystal drops, more blessed than tears, for they are salt; more precious than pearls. A thousand prayers of gratitude seemed hardly to quiet the souls of the lingering ones for that great charity of Heaven.
There came a day when the hearts of God's angels must have bled for the suffering ones. The breeze was fresh and fair; the sea tossed gaily its foam-crested waves; sea-birds soared in wider circles; and the clouds shook out their fleecy folds, through which the sunlight streamed in grateful warmth. The two ghosts were talking, as ever, of home, of earth, of land. Land,--land anywhere, so that it were solid and broad. O, to pace again a whole league without turning! O, to pause in the shadow of some living tree! To drink of some stream whose waters flowed continually; flowed, though you drank of them with the awful thirst of one who had been denied water for weeks and weeks and weeks, for three whole months,--an eternity, as it seemed to them.