But, oh! the ghastly burden that she bore! the dead and dripping woman, off whose face the water had washed the covering, and left it naked to the daylight; the gaunt bearded spectre baling out the boat on his knees, his wet clothes clinging to his frame like a skin of silk, and disclosing the piteous attenuation of the body; the steersman with wild and lustrous eyes sunk deep in livid sockets, the yoke-lines writhed around his lean brown hands, his lips pale and cracked, and his long neglected hair hanging like a wet mat over his forehead and down his back; and the shivering little figure in the bows, his hands squeezed together in an attitude of prayer, and his small face glimmering with unearthly ghastliness upon the gray background of the boat’s interior. Some flying-fish leaped out of the sea close to the boat, and buried their silver arrow-like shapes in a wave some distance ahead. Then the sun broke through a rent in the broad sombre cloud, and made the pelting ocean joyous with a snatch of cheerful light. But the strong wind lasted all the afternoon, and when it lulled just before sunset, Holdsworth was so exhausted, that in rising to give his seat to Johnson, he reeled and sank in a heap close beside the corpse at the bottom of the boat, and lay motionless and insensible. Johnson made no effort to restore him. Indeed, he thought he was dead. His own brain whirled; his tongue seemed to fill his mouth; there crept over him such a stupor as had visited Holdsworth; he let the yoke-lines go, and fixing his eyes on the sea, prepared to meet the death which his sensations led him to believe was at hand. The boat, tossed like a cork on the troubled water, broached to; but happily the wind was momentarily dying away; her head came round to the seas and she rode with as much safety as if Holdsworth were at the helm. For a whole hour the interior of the boat presented the same scene; the men motionless as the dead body, the boy squatting in the bows with nothing seemingly alive about him but his eyes, which winked as he rolled them seawards, where the sun shone on the water. Then Holdsworth began to groan and stir; whereupon Johnson fixed his dull eyes upon him, and watched him without any curiosity, without any sympathy, without any interest--indeed, scarcely, I might say, with human intelligence. The boy, seeing Holdsworth move, came creeping aft and remained on his knees, first looking at the man awaking to consciousness, and then at his mother, whose motionlessness and drowned aspect, and face made unfamiliar to him by its total want of expression, terrified him. Holdsworth raised his head and looked about him in bewilderment. “Where have I been? What has happened?” he cried. He fixed his eyes on the dead woman, his glance reverted to the boy, and then consciousness fully awoke. He rose wearily to his feet, and sank with a heavy sigh near Johnson, at whom he looked, scarcely knowing whether the man slept or was dead.