From the place where he sat, Morley's eye could command a range of about eight miles of sea, and as the day dawned he anxiously swept the offing, but in vain; nothing was visible, but what the Ancient Mariner saw, "the sea and sky, the sea and sky," till about sunrise, when a white sail and the smoke of a steamer, both hull down, could be seen at the horizon, some thirty miles off; thus, so far as succour was concerned, they might as well have been beyond the equator. Fourteen hours had he now been missing. What would be the emotions, the bewilderment, the grief of Ethel?--what the specious, the artful, it might be the villainous story framed by Hawkshaw to account for his disappearance? It might be one that would blast his character, blacken his memory, and sever even her love from him. Was not a murderer capable of anything? Now a fisher-boat, brown and tarry, with a patched lugsail, of no particular hue, bellying out in the fresh morning breeze, with the snow-white foam bubbling under her sharp prow, shot into sight about two miles off. Morley shouted, though he might have saved himself the trouble, for the two men who formed her crew could no more have heard him than if he had been in the moon; but he could not repress the impulse that made him halloo to them again and again. He waved his white handkerchief frantically. If observed, it would seem but a sea-bird's wing at such a distance; but the two black specks in the fishing-boat were seated with their backs to the shore, one intent upon handling his tiller, the other grasped the sheet, and both were enjoying their pipes and gazing seaward; so the boat, with her bellying sail, and foam-dripping prow, passed on, and Morley remained still unseen and alone. Other three boats passed, under a press of sail, towards the fishing ground; but they were far off--so far that he scarcely made any attempt to signal them. He felt no hunger; but now a thirst, which he had no means of allaying, and which the saline property of the atmosphere tended to increase, came upon him to add to his troubles and misery of mind and body. Now a steamer passed, bound for Ireland, or the Isle of Man. She was nearly ten miles off; but in the hope some idling tourist or passenger might be scanning the coast with a telescope or lorgnette, he continued, with anxious vigour, to wave his handkerchief, but waved it in vain, for she sped on her course and rapidly disappeared, though the long, smoky pennant, emitted by her funnel, lingered for hours across the sky before it melted into thin air and passed away. And still the angry waves boomed below, and the greedy sea-birds wheeled and screamed around him. How he longed for wings like the latter! "Oh, Heaven!" he exclaimed, "aid, inspire, and sustain me for a little time, or let me perish at once, and end this day of horror!"