While sent aloft, for practice, to assist in bending on the new foretopsail, Derval had not much time either for reflection on the catastrophe of the past sleepless night, or observing the wonderful multitude of turtle's eggs which cover all the rocks and shore thereabout between the months of December and April; but when excitement and work were over, he, like others, had leisure to think over poor Tom Titford, whose maritime career, to which he had looked forward in all the delight of youth, was thus ended ere it had well begun. His empty berth and vacant place at table, his uniform cap hanging on a peg, and his little trunk with all his worldly goods remained; but his soft smiling face and his earnest honest eyes were gone from human gaze for ever, and Derval and Hal Bowline were very sad on the subject of his sudden loss, which made them somehow closer friends, while each felt that the victim might have been himself or the other; and both instinctively clenched their fists when they heard Bitts say, with a silent laugh, that "even if the body were found, there would be no coroner's inquest in the latitude of Pedro-de-Noronha, and that young lubbers when they went aloft should remember the maxim of 'one hand for myself, and one for my owners.'" So the middy, of whose death the passing ship brought tidings, was not Derval Hampton, but little Tom Titford. Had it been himself, he thought, who would have sorrowed for him? and it cannot seem strange that the image of old Patty Fripp occurred to the lonely lad even before that of his own father. For days after the storm, he felt his legs and arms stiff from the effect of bruises and abrasions sustained in clasping the shrouds when going aloft to reef the topsails. Days of light breezes and bright weather followed each other now, and on a fine morning in March the cheerful cry of "Land in sight," passed from mouth to mouth on board the _Amethyst_. To Derval's eye, the faint blue mass that rose west-north-west about four miles distant, seemed an island; but to Talbot and many of the crew it was familiar as Cape Frio, a promontory on the Brazilian coast, sixty-four miles eastward of their destination; and with all that interest and curiosity excited by the appearance of a new and strange country, he watched the oval-shaped mass of granite cliff that terminates a long range of mountains, and all its features were distinct by five in the evening, when it was only seven miles distant.