Sorrowfully enough I unlashed him, and let him drop beneath the pitiless water; and then, finding my own strength beginning to fail, I lashed myself under the arms and over the spar, and hung on for dear life. In this posture I spent weary hour after hour watching the waves, and endeavouring to ward off from my head the fury of their onslaught. About mid-day the gale eased somewhat. I looked about me. Not a sign or vestige remained of the _Zebra_ or her hapless crew. Not a floating thing among the waves caused me to count on the company of a living wretch like myself. Not even a livid corpse across my track served to remind me that I, of all that ship's company, still clung to life. Strange visions, as I rose and fell with the heaving sea, floated before my eyes. The gloomy kitchen at Kilgorman, and my mother's letter gleaming under the hearthstone--the hollow on the cliff's edge where Tim and I had once fought--Biddy McQuilkin sitting at the fireside in our cabin, setting her cap at my father--Miss Kit with the gun at her shoulder behind the hall-door at Knockowen--the unhappy old man being dragged to the guillotine in Paris--the lumbering barge floating down the Seine--Tim in the light of the lantern at the helm of the _Kestrel_;--these and many other visions chased one another across my memory, first in regular procession, then tripping one over the other, then all jumbled and mixed together in such chaos that it was Kit who was being haled to the guillotine, and Tim who lay below the hearthstone, and Biddy who navigated the barge. Presently one vision seemed to hang in my memory longer than the others, and that was the light of the morning sun as it struck on the retreating sails of the brig _Scheldt_ of Rotterdam, standing out to sea off Malin. One by one all my other fancies merged into this--the guillotine changed into a brig, the _Kestrel_ changed into the _Scheldt_, the Kilgorman kitchen became a deck, and Miss Kit a Dutch skipper. Why was it? Why should everything come back to that one brig in the offing? Suddenly I understood it. There, as I looked up from my restless raft and followed the gleam of the afternoon sun as it broke through the clouds, I perceived just such another vision in the offing--a brig, with canvas set, and the light glancing on her sails as she laboured over the waves towards me! She may have been a mile away. By the look of her she was a foreign craft, and may have been a trader coasting between the Dutch ports. Whatever she was, the sight of her put new life into me. I took my red scarf--the very scarf I had waved so vainly at the _Scheldt_ scarce three weeks ago--and spreading it wide waved it with all the energy of which I was capable. How long the minutes seemed then! If she gave me the go-by, my last chance would go with her. Even as I raised myself to wave, my head reeled, and a dimness clouded my eyes.