“There’s two of them! See there--hard agin’ the mast!” The boat dropped astern and revealed her interior to the people aft. “My God! Two corpses in her!” cried the second mate. “Man the starboard fore braces!” shouted the skipper. The wheel flew round; the port fore-braces were let go, and the yards backed. The vessel’s way was stopped and a dozen hands came aft to lower away the port quarter boat. In jumped four men, the second mate at the tiller. “Lower away!” Down sank the boat, soused upon the water, the blocks were unhooked, out flew the oars. In a few minutes the boat was alongside the coffin with the black flag at her mast-head. The men grabbed her gunwale, and stood up to look in. God in Heaven! what a scene! Holdsworth lay on his back, his legs bent double under him, his arms stretched out, and his ghastly face upturned directly under a thwart. Johnson lay in a heap near the mast, and they thought him at first a bundle of clothes, until they caught sight of his hair and the fingers of one hand. _His_ face was hidden; but Holdsworth looked a gray and famished skeleton, with God’s signal of humanity eaten by suffering out of his face; his wrists, like white sticks, covered with sores, one foot naked, and the skin of that and of his face of the complexion and aspect of old parchment. Crumbling fragments of salted biscuit were scattered on one of the seats. Aft was the open locker half-filled with water, coloured like pea-soup by the ship’s bread that was soaked and partially dissolved in it. In the bows were the empty kegs with the bungs out, and as the boat swayed to and fro to the movements of the small waves with which the wind had crisped the sea, these kegs rolled against each other with hollow sounds. The dry, baked appearance of the boat, the fragments of biscuit, the empty kegs, and the skeleton men, formed a spectacle of horror and extreme misery, such as the wildest imagination could not realise without memory and experience to help it. Nor in this picture of pure ghastliness was the least ghastly item the black shawl, which fluttered its sable folds at the mast-head, and to the sailors typified, as no other image could, the character and quality of the horror they contemplated. “Can they be dead?” gasped one of the sailors, whose white face showed him almost overcome. “Mr. Anderson!” came a voice from the barque’s quarter-deck, “take the boat in tow and bring her alongside.” They made the painter fast to their stern, lowered her sail, and started with their grim burden gliding after them. The voices of the men overhanging the vessel’s bulwarks rose in a low, deep hum, when the boat was near enough to enable them to see its contents again. The port gangway was unshipped, and some hands stood by with lines to hoist the bodies inboard. “Do they live?” called out the skipper. “They both seem dead, sir,” answered Anderson.