On her head was the inevitable bright-colored handkerchief, the badge of her race, or rather of her condition in those days, and she wore the decent, blue-cotton frock, which marked her for a plantation-negro. Large hoops were in her flat, enormous ears, that seemed to suspend her shoulders as they touched them, drawn up and narrowed as these were, even beyond their natural hideousness, by her attitude, one which she maintained as stolidly as a dervish. "You must help us," I said, at last, when the crisis came, and affairs waxed desperate. "You must take the child, at least, and care for him. See, it requires two persons to sustain his dying mother--one to wet her lips, one--" "'Deed, honey," she interrupted, coolly, "you must 'scuse me dis oncst; I has jus' as much to do as I kin posomply 'complish, in keepin' of myself dry, comfable, and singin' ob my hyme-toones. We has all to take our chances dis time, an' do for our own selves, black and white; an' I don't see none ob my own white folks on dis raf', wich I is mighty proud of. Dar, now! I does b'leve dat is a ship sail way off dar. Does you see it, honey?" And she pointed to a large white gull, skimming the main at some distance. Disgusted with her selfishness, I vouchsafed her no farther notice at the time, and her crooning went on during the whole period of the bitter death-struggle of that poor sufferer, whose name I never knew, but whose little, deformed waif, the orphan of the raft, remained my heritage. "You will take care of him," she had said to me, in her last conscious moments, "my baby-boy, my little--" the name died on her lips, and she never spoke again. When she was dead, Christian Garth caused her to be wrapped in sail-cloth, weighted with chains, and, with a brief prayer, consigned to the deep. His superstitious sailor's fears rebelled against the idea of keeping a corpse on board one moment longer than necessary, so the rites of sepulture were speedily accomplished. When I remonstrated, feebly enough it is true, for exhaustion was supervening on long-sustained effort, at his haste, which, even under the circumstances, seemed to me indecent, he coolly spoke of it as a measure essential to the good of all. Talismanic as were these words on such occasion, mine were the lips that murmured the brief prayer, a portion of the solemn Episcopal grave-service that I chanced to remember, above the poor, pale corpse, even while my weary arms inclosed the struggling child, who, understanding nothing of the truth, would fain have plunged after his mother into depths unknown. A low, long roll of thunder smote on the ear, like a message to the ocean, from the heavens above, as we saw the waters close greedily over the form of our dead passenger. The men who had launched the body from the raft looked up and listened fearfully, and Christian Garth hastened to trim his sail.