She did not thus speak, but this was my interpretation of her words and signs. I regarded her and considered. Where could she lie, if not in the cabin? This, for her, was a miserable, horrible time; in as wild a passage of shipwreck and adventure as ever woman lived through, and my heart pitied her. It mattered not when the captain should be buried; and, meeting her eyes again, and beholding the superstition and fear in them, I looked up at the clock, that showed the hour to be a little after ten, and, holding up my hands and afterward two fingers, I said, “_Doce de la noche_--twelve of the night;” and, pointing and signing, gave her to know that at midnight we would bury the captain. She looked at me gratefully. “I must go,” said I. “Stop--oh, stop a minute!” she exclaimed in English, and went to her berth, looking fearfully toward the door of the captain’s cabin as she made her way, clinging and moving slowly, for very fierce and sharp at times was the jump of the deck. Strange, thought I, that the flight of a soul should make a terror of the shell it quits! It would be the same with that fine-eyed woman, with her aves and crossings. She dies; and the caballero on his knees at her feet, the gallant cavalier who has courage enough for the holding of her sweetness and her perfections to his heart while her charms live, springs to his legs, fetches a wide compass to avoid the corpse, and sooner than sleep a night beside the body would go to a lunatic asylum for the rest of his days. She came out of her berth clothed for the deck, wrapped up in her own comfortable slop-chest manufactures, but half an hour of the cold and blackness above sufficed; she went below again and sat under the clock waiting for midnight. I chose twelve because all hands would be astir at that hour. At twelve the starboard watch went below; Yan Bol would come aft, and then we’d bury the dead. Meanwhile I ordered a couple of the seamen in my watch to load the four nine-pounder carronades, that we might dispatch Greaves with a sailor’s honors to his bed of ooze. Lanterns were lighted and hung in the gangway in readiness.