It was very still, and unusually dark. There was dead silence in the corvette. Presently, I crawled softly to the stern window, and lying flat on my stomach over the transom, peered out into night. There, in reality, was my boat towing astern by a slack line! As I gazed, some one on deck above me drew in the rope with softest motion, until the skiff lay close under the windows. Patiently, slowly, cautiously,--fearing the sound of his fall, and dreading almost the rush of my breath in the profound silence,--I lowered my boy into the boat. The basket followed. The negro fastened the boat-hook to the cabin window, and on this, lame as I was, I followed the basket. Fortunately, not a plash, a crack, or a footfall disturbed the silence. I looked aloft, and no one was visible on the quarter-deck. A slight jerk brought the boat-rope softly into the water, and I drifted away into the darkness. CHAPTER XXXI. I drifted without a word or motion, and almost without breathing, until the corvette was perfectly obliterated against the hazy horizon. When every thing was dark around me, save the guiding stars, I put out the oars and pulled quietly towards the east. At day-dawn I was apparently alone on the ocean. My appetite had improved so hugely by the night's exercise, that my first devotion was to the basket, which I found crammed with bologna sausages, a piece of salt junk, part of a ham, abundance of biscuit, four bottles of water, two of brandy, a pocket compass, a jack-knife, and a large table-cloth or sheet, which the generous doctor had no doubt inserted to serve as a sail. The humbled _slaver_ and the _slave_, for the first time in their lives, broke bread from the same basket, and drank from the same bottle! Misfortune had strangely and suddenly levelled us on the basis of common humanity. The day before, he was the most servile of menials; to-day he was my equal, and, probably, my superior in certain physical powers, without which I would have perished! As the sun ascended in the sky, my wound became irritated by exercise, and the inflammation produced a feverish torment in which I groaned as I lay extended in the stern-sheets. By noon a breeze sprang up from the south-west, so that the oars and table-cloth supplied a square sail which wafted us about three miles an hour, while my boy rigged an awning with the blankets and boat-hooks. Thus, half reclining, I steered landward till midnight, when I took in the sail and lay-to on the calm ocean till morning. Next day the breeze again favored us; and, by sundown, I came up with the coasting canoe of a friendly Mandingo, into which I at once exchanged my quarters, and falling asleep, never stirred till he landed me on the Islands de Loss.