His Majesty had risen very early, and as I noted that he was gazing with intense anxiety at some distant object, I hurried up to the chart-house and procured a glass for him. The moment he put the spy-glass to his eye he turned ghastly pale, and with an exclamation of horror let it fall, clattering on the deck. It was fortunately not injured, and I hastily picked it up and looked in the same direction; and lo! away on our starboard quarter, with his face full upon us, much swollen and discoloured by the water, and his eyes started from their sockets by strangulation, floated the ill-fated Caracciolo! All the superstition of the Italians was called into play by this extraordinary and fearful apparition. His hair--which, though it was dark when we saw him that day at Pompeji, was turned quite grey with the apprehensions of his last few days--streamed in the light breeze that rippled the placid waters. I could see how alarmed the King was: no one but an Italian or Portuguese could have turned so deathly pale. We had many priests on board; they had swarmed round the King like flies round a pot of honey. I hunted them up now, one after another; but none was of the smallest consolation, till one, more adroit than his brothers, told the King that the spirit of his unfortunate Admiral could not rest without his forgiveness, which he had risen to implore. This the King was graciously pleased to accord, but without a corresponding effect on the corpse, which was head and shoulders above the water and was swimming (or drifting before the wind) to Naples. The occasion was a serious one. It would probably have been small loss to his kingdom if Ferdinand the First of the Two Sicilies had in a fit of horror plunged overboard to seek relief in a watery grave; but he was much more like to lose his kingdom over it than his kingdom was to lose him, for if ever Caracciolo reached Naples in that terrible position, which gave one the idea of a swimming man, all our eighteen ships of the line might not have been able to restrain the feelings of the populace. There was therefore nothing for it but for me to waken the Admiral, whom I had seen to bed in such sickness and dejection, from his uneasy slumbers. In supreme moments any man in the world who was near him must have turned to that commanding spirit for strength. But now I was more alarmed for the Admiral than for the King. What would, I wondered, be the effect on his mind, already overwrought by the terrible news of the preceding evening, of this apparition of one upon whom he had pronounced the death sentence found by the Sicilian court-martial. However, there was nothing for it but to fetch him. He was so ill that he could hardly walk, and I was in a cold sweat as to what would happen. I handed him my glass to look at that upon which all eyes were riveted, and to my joy I saw the blood and animation rush back to his face, and that curious smile spread over it that was there as we rode into the Nile.