But I need not have whipped myself on to my work so resolutely, nor have fretted myself in advance with planning the rush that I should make across the brig when I came to her--for I never, so far as I know, laid eyes on her again. For a little while, as in my first turn-about, I found my way backward without much difficulty--though again the different look that the ships had as I returned across them pulled me up from time to time with doubts about them; and then, just as before, I came to a place where more than one line of advance was open to me and there went wrong--as I knew a little later by finding myself aboard a vessel so strange in her appearance that my first glimpse over her deck satisfied me that I saw her then for the first time. This craft was an old-fashioned sloop-of-war, carrying eighteen guns; and that she had perished in action was as evident as that her death-battle had been fought a long while back in the past. The mauling that she had received had made an utter wreck of her--her masts being shot away and hanging by the board, most of her bulwarks being splintered, and her whole stern torn open as though a crashing broad-side had been poured into her at short range. Moreover, nearly all her guns had been dismounted, and two of them had burst in firing--as the shattered gun-carriages showed. But what most strongly proved the fierceness of her last action, and the length of time that had passed since she fought it, were the scores of skeletons lying about her deck--a few with bits of clothing hanging fast to them, but most of them clean fleshless naked bones. Just as they had fallen, there they lay: with legs or arms or ribs splintered or carried off by the shot which had struck them, or with bullet-holes clean through their skulls. But the sight of them, while it put a sort of awe upon me, did not horrify me; because time had done its cleansing work with them and they were pure. Indeed, my imagination was taken such fast hold of by coming upon this thrilling wreck of ancient sea-battle, fought out fiercely to a finish generations before ever I was born, that for a little while I forgot my own troubles entirely; and so got over the shock which my first sight of the riddled sloop and her dead crew had given me by proving that again I had lost my way. And my longing to know all that I could find out about it--backed by the certainty that I should not come upon anything below that would revolt me--led me to go searching in the shattered cabin for some clue to the sloop's name and nationality, and to the cause in which her death-fight had been fought.