‘Am I to be out in this boat all night?’ I thought to myself. ‘If so, I shall die of cold and exhaustion. I cannot pass the whole long night alone in this open boat in the rain, and in the bitter cold wind, wet through to the skin as I already am, without anybody to speak to, without food or drink, without a ray of light for my eyes to find comfort in resting on. O God! O God! I cried, and I went down upon my knees in the boat, and, clasping my hands, I gazed upwards into the grey, wet shadow of the sky, under which the naked mast of the boat was reeling, and I prayed to God to be with me, to watch over me, to bring help to me before I expired of fear and cold, and to return me to my sister, and to my little ones who were waiting for me. And now I scarcely know how to proceed. What followed was a passage--a horribly long passage--of mental suffering incommunicable by the pen, nay scarcely to be remembered or understood by the sufferer herself. It fell dark, and the black night came, the blacker because there was no moon and because of the rain and the mist. I had gathered the wet cloths of the sail about me as a sort of shelter, and I sat with my head above the line of the gunwale, for ever looking to left and to right, and to right and to left, and never seeing more than the pale, near gleam of froth. At times thought grew maddening, and I shrieked like one in a fit or like a woman insane. It was not the fear of death that maddened me, it was not the anguish of the cold and the wet, nor even the fearful loneliness of my situation, a loneliness that cannot be imagined, for what magic is there in ink to figure the impenetrable blackness of the night, to imitate the snapping and sobbing sounds of the water and the hissing of the wind? No, it was the thought of my husband and my children; and it was chiefly the thought of my children. Again and again, when my mind went to them, I would catch myself moaning, and again and again I shrieked. With the eye of imagination I saw them sleeping: I saw my darling boy slumbering restfully in his little bed, I saw my baby asleep in her little cot; I bent over them in fancy; I kissed the golden hair of my boy, and I kissed the soft cheek of my baby; and then the yearnings of my heart grew into agony insupportable. And there was a dreadful fancy that again and again visited me. Amid the crawling and blinking foam over the boat’s side I sometimes imagined I saw the body of Hitchens. It came and went. I knew it was a deception of the senses, yet I stared as though it were there indeed. Sometimes there would come a sound in the wind that resembled the groan he had uttered when he fell overboard.