“Nonsense!” said Augusta, “eat some biscuit and you will feel better.” He took a piece of the biscuit which she gave him, and attempted to swallow it, but could not. “It is no use,” he said; “I am a dying man. Sitting in those wet clothes in the boat has finished me.” And Augusta, looking at his face, could not but believe him. CHAPTER IX. AUGUSTA TO THE RESCUE. After breakfast—that is, after Augusta had eaten some biscuit and a wing that remained from the chickens she had managed to cook upon the previous day—Bill and Johnnie, the two sailors, set to work, at her suggestion, to fix up a long fragment of drift-wood on a point of rock, and to bind it on to a flag that they happened to find in the locker of the boat. There was not much chance of its being seen by anybody in that mist-laden atmosphere, even if anybody came there to see it, of which there was still less chance; still they did it as a sort of duty. By the time this task was finished it was midday, and, for a wonder, there was little wind, and the sun shone out brightly. On returning to the huts Augusta got the blankets out to dry, and set the two sailors to roast some of the eggs they had found on the previous day. This they did willingly enough, for they were now quite sober, and very much ashamed of themselves. Then, after giving Dick some more biscuit and four roasted eggs, which he took to wonderfully, she went to Mr. Meeson, who was lying groaning in the hut, and persuaded him to come and sit out in the warmth. By this time the wretched man’s condition was pitiable, for, though his strength was still whole in him, he was persuaded that he was going to die, and could touch nothing but some rum-and-water. “Miss Smithers,” he said, as he sat shivering upon the rocks, “I am going to die in this horrible place, and I am not fit to die! To think of me,” he went on with a sudden burst of his old fire, “to think of me dying like a starved dog in the cold, when I have two millions of money waiting to be spent there in England! And I would give them all—yes, every farthing of them—to find myself safe at home again! By Jove! I would change places with any poor devil of a writer in the Hutches! Yes, I would turn author on twenty pounds a month!—that will give you some idea of my condition, Miss Smithers! To think that I should ever live to say that I would care to be a beggarly author, who could not make a thousand a year if he wrote till his fingers fell off!—oh! oh!” and he fairly sobbed at the horror and degradation of the thought. Augusta looked at the poor wretch and then bethought her of the proud creature she had known, raging terribly through the obsequious ranks of clerks, and carrying desolation to the Hutches and the many-headed editorial department. She looked, and was filled with reflections on the mutability of human affairs. Alas! how changed that Meeson!