"You are like to," said he, without the least resentment; "but if you will take the advice I shall give, you will either notably increase your chances of it, or else will get what is hardly less to be desired, I mean food." Too faint to demand what he intended by that, I lay still, careless whether he made his purpose clear or not. "Seeing that we cannot get off our irons," he went on, "we must eat or die, bound. Now I believe that it is night and most of the crew drunk. If it be so, we shall get food enough and perhaps our freedom too. If it be not so, you shall have your will presently and die; for it is you who must go above, Denis, seeing I cannot do so, that have my ankle broke with this cursed chain." I got upon my feet, all confused as I was and sick with famine; but his greater courage moved me to obey him in this if I could, though I expected but little good of it. "They will hear my chains," I said. "I will muffle them," he replied, and tore off three or four strips of his silken coat that he yet wore, and with them wrapped up the links in such sort as I should move along without noise, though still heavily. After that I left him, going up the ladder to the trap in the roof of the hold, which none had troubled to make fast, knowing, or at least believing, that we were safe enough in our shackles, without further precaution taken. It was indeed night, as my uncle had supposed; and such a night as seemeth to lift a man out of his present estate, so limited and beat upon by misfortunes, and to touch his lips with a savour of things divine. There is a liberation in the wide spaces of the night, and a glory unrevealed by any day. I stood awhile where I was upon the deck, simply breathing in the cool air and taking no thought for my safety. A gunner lay beside his gun, asleep with his head upon the carriage; I could have touched him with my outstretched arm....