So the tragic hour began for me, and such were its circumstances! The rushing waters booming as a dirge in my ears, my clothes dragging me down as a burden insupportable; darkness and the dread sea all about me; a black sky meeting my vision as I rose gasping to the surface—no knowledge now of where the boat lay or in what direction to strike out; no certainty that my friends had seen me or were alive to my situation—nothing but silence and the long rollers carrying me, and far away a distant shouting, an echo of pistol shots, a rejoinder of strong voices and then a silence, so deep, so profound that the very wavelets were as cataracts beating at my brain. This, surely, was the moment when a man might have told himself that he was cast out utterly from man and the world, a true derelict of the vast ocean, a voice crying in a monstrous silence, a sacrifice to wind and wave and the gaping sea. The deepest dungeon ashore could not have inflicted a wound of desolation so terrible. I was there within a cable’s length of those who would have given their very lives for me, and yet as far away from them as though I had stood at the foot of Mount Terror and cried to the skies for my salvation. Not a sound, not a whisper of life did the wind bear to me. A strong swimmer, I lay deep in the water, the spindrift cold upon my face, the ripples of the crests soaking my hair, the blue-black sky for my zenith. And how far had those minutes carried me from humanity and all human interests! Calmly, as a man in a reverie of the mind could, I recounted this adventure from the beginning, and wondered why I had set out upon it at all. What was it to me that these rogues pitted their wits against their brother rogues ashore? Who had made me the judge of crime and its servants, or permitted me to say that one man was a thief and another man honest? The great ocean laughed at such laws and their makers. Might and majesty and the throne of winds—were not they a kingdom stupendous in its grandeur and unsurpassable in its magnitude? No sense of danger, indeed, went with me to the waters. I heard their dulcet voice and answered them—I saw the figures I had known and loved, and no sense of regret attended the vision. An unquenchable fire of confidence burned in my brain. I believed that I should see little Joan again, though the waters engulfed me utterly.