I could hear every word of the conversation, as the excited tones of the speakers came borne to leeward upon the gale, but although I shouted back with desperate strength, I felt that my cries were unheard by my shipmates to windward. The distance between myself and the merchantman was meanwhile rapidly increasing, and every moment her dark figure became more and more shadowy. With that presence of mind which is soon acquired in a life of peril, I had begun to tread water the instant I had gone overboard; but I felt that my strength would soon fail me, and that I must sink, unaided, into the watery abyss. Oh! who can tell my feelings as I saw the figure of the merchantman gradually becoming more dim in the distance, and heard the voices of my friends, at first loud and distinct, dying away into indistinct murmurs. Alone on the ocean! My breath came quick; my heart beat wildly; I felt the blood rushing in torrents to my brain. The scene meanwhile grew darker around me. The faint hope I had entertained that the ship would be put about, gradually died away; and even while I looked, she suddenly vanished from my vision. I strained my eyes to catch a sight of her as I rose upon a billow. Alas! she was not to be seen. Was there then no hope? Young; full of life; in the heyday of love—oh! God it was too much to endure! I felt that my last hour had come. Already the waters seemed roaring through my ears, and strange, fantastic figures to dance before my eyes. In that hour every event of my life whirled through my memory! I thought of my childhood; of my mother in her weeds; of her prayers over her only child; and of the cold wintry day when they laid her in her grave, and told me that I was an orphan. I thought too of my boyhood; of my college life; of my early days at sea; of the eventful months which had just passed; of my hopes of a bright career or a glorious death, thus to be quenched forever; and of Beatrice, my own Beatrice, whom I was to see no more. Wild with the agony of that thought, I tossed my arms aloft, and invoked a dying blessing on her head. At that instant something came shooting past me, borne on the bosom of a towering wave. It was a lumbering chest, doubtless one of those thrown overboard from the merchantman. I grasped it with a desperate effort: I clambered up upon it; and as I felt its frail planks beneath me, a revulsion came over my bosom. The fisherman by his fireside, when the tempest howls around his dwelling, could not have felt more confident of safety than I now did, with nothing but this simple chest between me and the yawning abyss. Quick, gushing emotions swept through my bosom; I burst into tears; and lifting up my voice, there, alone, on the wide ocean, I poured forth my thanksgivings to God.