... Just now Bellair, lifting his overcoat to draw it closer around him, sensed its unaccustomed weight on the left. His hand sped thither, touched the full bottle of Bourbon whiskey purchased in Savannah. His hand remained with it a moment. A shudder passed through the small boat from Stackhouse, who had come to from another hideous sleep. 3 Bellair stared into the sea. No one had spoken for many minutes. It was close to noon. Though all that had to do with memory since the sinking of the _Jade_ was treacherous, according to his recounting, it was but the second day; that is, the mother-ship had gone down in the heart of night before last.... Bellair had given away to temptation, when he let his eyes sink into the depths. He had fought it for hours, and knew that nothing good would come of it, but there was so much to fight, he had not the further strength for this. The sea was calm on the surface, but there appeared a movement below, so vast and unhurried, that it was like some planetary function. There seemed a draw of the depths southward, an under-movement toward the Pole. At times a cloud of purple would rise from far beneath and shut off his peering, like the movement of blueing in a laundry-tub before it is well-diffused. It came to him that this was but a denser cloud-land--an ocean of condensed clouds, moved not by winds alone, but the stirring of the earth’s mysterious inner attractions, which in their turn were determined by the sun and moon and stars. It was all orderly, but he, Bellair, was out of order. And such a little thing--a quart of cool water, and any one of the thousands of meals he had thoughtlessly, gratelessly bought and paid for--thousands consumed with a book at hand, or a paper to keep his mind off the perfunctory routine of feeding himself. Hundreds of meals he had taken, because it was the hour, and a cigar was more pleasurable afterward; meals in his room--paper packages of food, pails of ice, chilled bottles with a mist forming on them; saloon lunches, plates of colored sausages, creamy-rose slices of ham, tailored radishes and herring pickled in onions.... There was not a fish in the sea, not a movement but the blueing, and that slide of the under-ocean river to the Pole.