Without volition, as it were, as if indeed the ship’s populace were the vehicles of some vocal current-electric, with one voice, from alow and aloft, came a resonant echo--‘God bless Captain Vere!’ And yet at that instant Billy alone must have been in their hearts, even as he was in their eyes. At the pronounced words and the spontaneous echo that voluminously rebounded them, Captain Vere, either through stoic self-control or a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood erectly rigid as a musket in the ship-armourer’s rack. The hull, deliberately recovering from the periodic roll to leeward, was just regaining an even keel, when the last signal, the preconcerted dumb one, was given. At the same moment it chanced that the vapoury fleece hanging low in the east, was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn. In the pinioned figure, arrived at the yard-end, to the wonder of all, no motion was apparent save that created by the slow roll of the hull, in moderate weather so majestic in a great ship heavy-cannoned. A DIGRESSION When some days afterwards in reference to the singularity just mentioned, the purser, a rather ruddy, rotund person, more accurate as an accountant than profound as a philosopher, said at mess to the surgeon, ‘What testimony to the force lodged in will-power,’ the latter, spare and tall, one in whom a discreet causticity went along with a manner less genial than polite, replied, ‘Your pardon, Mr. Purser. In a hanging scientifically conducted--and under special orders I myself directed how Budd’s was to be effected--any movement following the completed suspension and originating in the body suspended, such movement indicates mechanical spasm in the muscular system. Hence the absence of that is no more attributable to will-power, as you call it, than to horse-power--begging your pardon.’ ‘But this muscular spasm you speak of, is not that in a degree more or less invariable in these cases?’ ‘Assuredly so, Mr. Purser.’ ‘How then, my good sir, do you account for its absence in this instance?’ ‘Mr. Purser, it is clear that your sense of the singularity in this matter equals not mine. You account for it by what you call will-power, a term not yet included in the lexicon of science. For me I do not with my present knowledge pretend to account for it at all. Even should one assume the hypothesis that at the first touch of the halyards the action of Budd’s heart, intensified by extraordinary emotion at its climax, abruptly stopped--much like a watch when in carelessly winding it up you strain at the finish, thus snapping the chain--even under that hypothesis how account for the phenomenon that followed?’ ‘You admit, then, that the absence of spasmodic movement was phenomenal?’