I met Laura’s sad and wondering eyes, and divined her thoughts. The instinct of self-preservation was indeed a very powerful development in her ladyship’s bosom. Is she not ashamed to let us all see how anxious she is about her life, Laura’s glance at me seemed to say, after the sufferings and death her behaviour has brought about--her husband drowned, the unhappy man she abandoned her home for floating in the depths beyond the horizon there----? Cutbill descended, followed by Dowling. ‘’Tis an amazing sight, surely,’ he exclaimed, wringing the perspiration in a shower from his forehead. ‘The decks is flinty hard with shell, but I reckon a space is to be cleared just under the break of the poop, and it feels almost cool up there arter these here rocks. There’s a porpoise aft as’ll want chucking overboard. ’Tain’t no grampus, as Dowling says. Only I tell ye, capt’n, that there deck’s a sight to make a man see twenty times more’n he looks at.’ Finn’s spirits had improved through his having something else to think of than the loss of the yacht and the drowning of her people. He was fetching his breath, too, with comparative ease, and only at long intervals brought his hand to his side. This improvement in him greatly cheered me. I liked the rough, homely sailor much, and his death would have been a blow. The man Johnson had by this time made shift to rise and join us, but he walked with a weak step and looked very sadly, as though a deal of the life had been washed out of him in his struggle to fetch the shore. He was of no use to us, and I told him to go and sit in the shadow of the hull out of the blaze of the sun.