They walked slowly forward. Here and there a seaman repairing a sail, or working in the lower shrouds, or doing one of the endless jobs of splicing, whipping, tarring, cleaning, which are so many conditions of the maritime life, looked at Holdsworth earnestly, but never intrusively; and when he was at the boat some of the hands came up to him with a spokesman, a middle-aged sailor in ear-rings, who said: “Beg pardon, sir, but all hands wishes to say as they’re werry glad to see you up and doing; and if there’s e’er a thing any man among us can do in helping to make you comfortable while you’re with us, they’ll do it and welcome; and no liberty is intended.” “Thank you, and God bless you!” answered Holdsworth, greatly moved by this speech, and with an expression on his face that could hardly fail to let the honest seamen know that their goodwill was not the less appreciated because it provoked no lengthened reply. The men retired, saying among themselves that, “though the gentleman warn’t a sailor, he ought to be one; and though he was nothing but a skeleting, he had as honest a face on him as ever they seed.” “This is the boat,” said Mr. Sherman. Holdsworth steadied himself by holding on to the gunwale and looked into it. The bags of bread lay under the aftermost thwart; there was the open locker which the sea had filled with water; there were the empty kegs, whose hollow rollings, as the boat had swayed to and fro, had formed such suggestive notes of torture, as one might think would nevermore depart from the ear that had received the echo. If there were impressions like red-hot brands to sear the mind with burning transcripts of the ugly agonising facts they counterfeited, one, if any of them, would surely be the impression conveyed by the scenes of which the interior of the boat had been the theatre. Here the widow had died, with her arm hanging over the side, yonder the General had expired, pointing to the phantom of his native town, which dying memory had evoked from the air; from that spot the actor had leaped; and on that seat the boy had died, holding out his hands to the sinking sun. The little arena should have been vital with memory, so small was the space in which infinite human misery had been packed. But to Holdsworth it conveyed no ideas. Not the faintest illumination entered his face in surveying it. To Mr. Sherman it was a thousandfold more significant than to Holdsworth, who was the chief actor in the heart-breaking tragedy that had been enacted in it. Yet he knew that it _ought_ to have an interest for him; and he stood clutching and staring at it, with a frowning forehead, wrestling wildly with his mind, in which the corpse of memory lay deep and hidden. After a long interval he passed his hand across his eyes, and turned to Mr. Sherman. “It will not come,” he said.