Why did they faint in the hour of deliverance when that narrow chasm was all that separated them from renewed life? Because the barque spread out her great white wings and soared away, hearing not the faint voices, seeing not the thin shadows that haunted that drifting wreck. The forsaken ones looked out from their eyrie, and watched the lessening sail until sight failed them, and then the lad with one wild cry leaped toward the speeding barque, and was swallowed up in the sea. Alone in a wilderness of waters! Alone, without compass or rudder, borne on by relentless winds into the lonesome, dreary, shoreless ocean of despair, within whose blank and forbidding sphere no voyager ventures; across whose desolate waste dawn sends no signal and night brings no reprieve; but whose sun is cold, and whose moon is clouded, and whose stars withdraw into space, and where the insufferable silence of vacancy shall not be broken for all time. O pitiless Nature! thy irrevocable laws argue rare sacrifice in the waste places of God's universe!... * * * * * The Petrel gave a tremendous lurch, that sent two or three of us into the lee corners of the cabin; a sea broke over us, bursting in the companion-hatch, and half filling our small and insecure retreat; the swinging lamp was thrown from its socket and extinguished; we were enveloped in pitch-darkness, up to our knees in salt water. There was a moment of awful silence: we could not tell whether the light of day would ever visit us again; we thought perhaps it wouldn't. But the Petrel rose once more upon the watery hilltops and shook herself free of the cumbersome deluge; and at that point, when she seemed to be riding more easily than usual, some one broke the silence: "Well, did the captain of the Perle live to tell the tale?" Yes, he did. God sent a messenger into the lonesome deep, where the miserable man was found insensible, with eyes wide open against the sunlight, and lips shrunken apart--a hideous breathing corpse. When he was lifted in the arms of the brave fellows who had gone to his rescue, he cried "Great God! am I saved?" as though he couldn't believe it when it was true: then he fainted, and was nursed through a long delirium, and was at last restored to health and home and happiness. Our cabin-boy managed to fish up the lamp, and after a little we were illuminated: the agile swab soon sponged out the cabin, and we resumed our tedious watch for dawn and fairer weather.