Happening to bend my gaze down upon the raft, into some interstice close against where the hatch-cover was secured, I spied what, for the moment, I might have supposed a pair of glow-worms, minute, but defined enough. Then I believed there was a little pool of water there, and that it reflected a couple of stars. A moment after I guessed what it was, and in a very frenzy of the superstition that had been stirring in me, and in many directions of thought influencing me from the moment of my leaving the barque, I had my hand upon the great rat--for that was what it was--and sent it flying overboard. I remember the wild squeak of the thing as I hurled it--you would have supposed it the cry of a distant gull. There was a little fire in the water, and I could see where it swam, and all very quietly I seized hold of a loose plank and, waiting till it had come near, I hit it, and kept on hitting it, till I might be sure it was drowned. Some little noise I may have made: Helga spoke in her sleep, but did not wake. You will smile at my mentioning this trifling passage; you would laugh could I make you understand the emotion of relief, the sense of exultant happiness, that possessed me when I had drowned this rat. When I look back and recall this little detail of my experiences, I never doubt that the overwhelming spirit of the loneliness of that ocean night lay upon me in a sort of craziness. I thought of the rat as an evil spirit, a something horribly ominous to us, a menace of suffering and of dreadful death while it stayed with us. God knows why I should have thus thought; but the imagination of the shipwrecked is quickly diseased, and the moods which a man will afterwards look back upon with shame and grief and astonishment are, while they are present, to him as fruitful of terrible imaginings as ever made the walls of a madhouse ring with maniac laughter. It might have been some half-hour after this--the silly excitement of the incident having passed out of my mind--that I fell into a doze. Nature was well-nigh exhausted in me, yet I did not wish to sleep. In proportion, however, as the workings of my brain were stealthily quieted by the slumberous feelings stealing over me, so the soothing influences without operated: the cradling of the raft, the hushing and subduing gaze of the stars, the soft whispering of the wind. I was awakened by a rude shock, followed by a hoarse bawling cry. There was a second shock of a sort to smartly bring my wits together, attended with several shouts, such as--'What is it? What have ye run us into? Why, stroike me silly, if it ain't a raft!' I sprang to my feet, and found the bows of a little vessel overhanging us. Small as I might know her to be, she yet loomed tall and black, and even seemed to tower over us, so low-seated were we. She lined her proportions against the starry sky, and I made out that she had hooked herself to us by running her bowsprit through the stays which supported our mast.