THE DEATH SHIP:

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9145, 29 August 1888, Page 3

THE DEATH SHIP:

[NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.!

A STRANGE STORY.* AN ACCOUNT OF A CRUISE IN THE FLYING DUTCH MAN, COLLECTED FROM THE PAPISKS OF THE LATE MR. GEOFFREY FENTON, OF TOPLAB, MASTER MARINER BY W. CLARK RUSSELb, Author of "The Wreck of the Grosvenor, "The Golden Hope," <6c, Ac. , {All Rights Reserved.J CHAPTER XXv-111. VAKDEKDBCKKN WALKS IN HIS SLEEP. It was as I had feared, and had the captain of i he man-of-war promised to blow his ship and men into a thousand atoms if the boat's crew refused to obey his orders to board us, they would have accepted that fate in preference to the hideous alternative adventure. In a trice the pinnace was alongside the frigate, the crew over the rail, and the boat hoisted. The yards on the main flew round, royals and topgallant sails were set, studding-sails were run aloft, and before ten minutes had elapsed since the boat had started to board us, the frigate, under a whole cloud of canvas, was heeling and gently rolling and pitching over the brilliant blue sea, with her head north-east and her stern dead at us, the gilt there and the windows converting her betwixt her quarters into the apj>earance of a huge sparkling square of crystal, the glory of which flung upon her wake under it a splendour so great that it was as though she had fouled a sunbeam and was dragging the dazzle after her. I looked at Imogene ; her beautiful eyes had yearned after the ship, into the dimness of tears. '.' My dear, do not fret," said I, again calling her " my dear," for I still lacked the courage to call her "my love"; "this experience makes me clear on one point: we shall escape, but not by a ehip." "How, if not by a ship?" eho cried, tremulously. Before I could reply, Vandordecken looked round upon us, and came our way, at the same time telling Van Vogelaar to swing the topsail yard and board his main tack. " 'TIS in this fashion," he exclaimed, "that most of the ahips I meet serve me. It would be enough to make me deem 3'our countrymen a lily-livered lot if the people of other nationSj my own included, did not sheer off before I could explain my need.or learn their motives in desiring to board us. What alarmed t'ie people of that ship, think you, mynheer':' "Who can tell, sir?" I responded in as collected a manner as I could contrive. " They might suspect us hardly worth the trouble of capturing— ' He motionud an angry dissent. " Or," I continued, abashed, and speaking hurriedly, "they mighc have seen something in the appearance of your crew to promise a bloody resistance." " By the Holy Trinity !" be cried, with the most vehement scorn, "if such a thing were conceivable I should have been glad to confirm it with a broadside !" And hi.s eye came from the frigate that was fast lessening in the distance to his poor show of rust-eaten sakers and green-coated swivels.

It was an hour after our usual dinnertime, and Prins arrived to tell the captain the meal was on the tablo. He put Imojjene'ts hand under his arm caressingly, and I followed them with one wistful look at the frigate that was already a toy and far off, melting like a cloud into the junction of sapphire ether and violet ocean. I saw Vanderdecken level a glance at her too, and as we entered the cabin he said, addressing me, but without turning his head, and leading Imopene to the table, " It will be a disappointment to you, mynheer, that your countrymen would not stay to receive you '(" "It was your intention," said I, "that 1 should go with them?" "Certainly," he answered, confronting me slowly and eyeing me haughtily ; " you are an Englishman, but you are not my prisoner." " We may be more fortunate next time," I s.iid. coldly. "Tis to be hoped !" said Van Vogelaar, ■ who had followed last, speaking in his harshest and sourest tone. I turned to eye him ; but at the moment, the parrot, probably animated by our voices, croaked out, hoarsely ; " ailrj 2gn al UtroomlJ!" on which the fellow broke out into a coarse, raw "ha ! ha !" yet never stirring a muscle of his storm-hammered face. 'Twould have been like fighting with phantoms and fiends to war in words with these men. I am here, thought I, and there is yonder sweetheart to rescue before I am done with this Death Ship : and with a smile at her earnest, half-startled eyes, I seated myself. I remember when the evening came 0:1 that same day we had been chased and abandoned by the Centaur, walking up and down the lee-side of the short poop alone, Arents, who had charge, standing silent near the helmsman. I had worked myself up into great confusion and distress of mind. Dejection had been followed by a Ht of nervousness, and when I looked iround me at the unmeasurable waste of ocean darkling in the east to the growing shadows there, at the ancient heights of canvas above me, with the dingy rusty red of the western light slipping from tho hollow breasts and off the sallow spars, till the edges of the sails melted into a spectral faintnese upon the gradual gloom, at the desolate grassy appearance of the decks, he dull motions, the death-like posture of the three or four men standing here and 1 here forward —I felt as if the curse of the ship had fallen upon my heart and life too —that it was my doom to languish in her till my death —to love and yet be denied fruition— to yearn for our release with the same impntency of desire that governed the navigation of this Death Ship towards the home it was the will of God she was never to approach. On turning from a short contemplation of the sea over the stern, I observed Imogene at the head of the ladder conducting from the poop to the quarter-deck, watching me. It was the first opportunity which had offered for speaking with her alone since dinner time.

" Captain Vanderdecken has gone to his cabin to take some rest," said she. "I knew you were above by your tread." " Ah ! you can recognise me by that ?" " Yes, and by the dejection in it, too," she answered, smiling. "There is hurpan feeling in the echo; the footfalls of the others are as meaningless as the sound of wood smitten by wood." "I am very dull and weary hear ted," said I. "Thanks be to God that you are in this ship to give me hope and warmth." "And I thank Him, too, for sending you to me," said she. I took her hand and kissed it; indeed, but for Arente and tho helmsman, I should have taken her to my heart with my lips upon hers. " Let us walk a little," said I. " Wβ will step softly. We do not want the captain to surprise us." I took her hand, and we slowly paced the deck. "All the afternoon," said I, "I have been considering how we are to escape. There is no man among this ghostly crew who has a friendly eye for me, and so whatever is done must be done by me alone." " You must trust no one," she cried, quickly; " the plan you light upon must be our secret. There is a demon imprisoned in Vanderdecken ; if it should be loosed he mierht take your life." " I don't doubt it. And suppose I went armed : my conflict would bo with deathless men ! No ! no ! my plan must be our secret, as you say. But what is it ? If but a gleam of light sank ite ray into this darkness I should take heart." She pressed my hand, saying, "The frigate's abandoning of us has depressed you. But an opportunity will surely come." " Yea, the behaviour of the frigate has depressed me. But why ? Because she has made me see that the greatest calamity which could befall us would be our encountering a ship willing to parloy with us." " Is it so ?" "I fear: because Vanderdecken would send me to her and separate us." Then bethinking me, by observing htsr head sink, how doleful and unmanly was such reasoning as this, such apprehension of what might be, without regard to the possibility of our salvation lying in the very circumstance or

situation I dreaded, I said, heartening my voice: " Imogene, though I have no plan, yet my instincts tell me that our best, perhaps our sole chance of escaping from this snip, will be in necessity arising tor her to drop anchor off the coast, for careening, or for procuring provisions and water. Think, my dear, cloeoly of it! We dare not count upon any ship we meet taking such action as will ensure our joint deliverance. No body oi seamen, learning what vessel thia is, would have anj'thing to do with her. Then, as to escaping from her at sea, even if it were in the power of these weak, unaided arms to hoist one of those boats there over the side unpsreeived, I know not whether my love for thee, Imogene—whether, 0 forgive me if I grieve you—" She stirred her hand, as if to remove it, but I held it the tighter, feeling in the warm and delicate palm the dew that emotion was distilling there. She was silent, and we came to a stand. She eaid in a weak and trembling voice : "You do not grieve me. Why snould I grieve to be loved ?" " You are beautiful and good and a sailor's child, my dearest," said I. " And friendless."

" No ! bid me say I love thee." She bade me whisper, drawing closer to me. I swiftly kissed her cheek that was cold with the evening wind. Great Heaven ! what a theatre this was for love-making. To think of the sweetest, in our case the purest, of emotions having its birth in, owing its growth to, the dreaded fabric of the Death Ship ! Yet I, that a short while ago was viewing the vessel with despondency and fear, and loathing, now for a space found her transfigured ! The kiss my darling had permitted, her gentle speech, the carees that lay in her drawing close to me, had kindled a light in my heart, and the lustre waft upon the ship; ft faint ■ niriianoe viewless to the sight, but of a power to work such transformation that instead of a gaunt phosphoric structure sailing through the dusk, there floated under the stars a fabric whose sails might have, been of satin, whoso cordage might have, been formed of golden threads, whose decks might have been fashioned 6ut of pearl! We were silent for awhile, and then she said, in a coyly-coquettish voico, with a iiappy note of music in it: " What wore you saying, Mr. Fenton, when you interrupted yourself?" " Dear heart!" cried I, " you must call me Geoffrey now."' •' What were you saying, Geoffrey?" said she. "Why," I replied, "that even were it possible for me to secure one of those boats, and launch it un perceived, my love would not suffer me to expose you to the perils of such an adventure." " My life is in your keeping, Geoffrey," she said. "You need but lead—l will follow. Yet there is one thing you must consider; if we escape to the land, which seems to me the plan that is growing in you—" i said, " Yes," watching the sparkling of the stars in her byes, which she had fixed on mine. " Are not the perils which await us there greater than any the sea can threaten, supposing we abandoned ourselves to its mercy in that little bout yonder ? There are many wild beasts on the coast; often in the stillness of the night, when we have been lying at anchor, have I heard the roaring and trumpetting of thorn. And more dreadful and fearful than leopards, wild elephants and terrible serpents—all of which abound, dear—crocodiles in the rivers, and poisonous, tempting fruit and herbs —arc the savages, the hideous un dollied Kaffirs, and tho barbarous tribes which I have heard my father tell of as occupying the land for leagues and leagues from the Cape to the coast opposite the Island of Madagascar." A strange shudder ran through her, and letting blip my hand to take my arm— for now that she knew I loved her she passed from her girlish coynebe into a bride-like tenderness and freedom, and put a caressing manner into her very walk as she paced at my side—she cried, "Oh, do you know, Geoffrey, if ever a nightmare freezes my heart it is when I dream 1 am taken captive by ono of those black tribes, and carried beyond the mountains to .serve as a slave !"

The dusk had thickened into night, the stars swung in glory to the majeetical motion of the mastheads, there was a curl of moon in the west like a paring of pearl designed for a further enrichment 01 the jewelled skies, the phosphor trembled alono the deck?, and all substantial outlines swam into indistinctness in an atmosphere that seemed formed of fluid indigo. Visible against the luminaries the quartergallery was the figure of the mate ; but the helmsman near him was shrouded by the pale haze that floated smokelike about the binnacle. Flakes of the sea-glow slipped slowly past the black welter as though* the patches of star-dust on high mirrored themselves in this silent ebony water. From time to time a brilliant meteor Hashed out upon the night and sailed into a ball of fire that far outshone the glory of the greatest stars. The dew fell lightly, the crystals trembled along the rail and winked to the stirring of the wind with the sharp sparkle of diamonds ; and though we were in the cold season, yet the light breeze, having a nuph of northing in it, was pure refreshment without touch of cold ; so that a calmer, fairer night than this I do not conceive ever descended upon a ship at sea. Thrice the clock struck in the cabin, and whenever the first chime sounded I would start as if we were near land and the sound was the note of a distant cathedral bell; and punctually with the last stroke would come tho rasping voice of the parrot, reminding all who heard it of their condition. Occasionally Arents moved, but never by more than a stride or two ; forward all was (lead blackness and stillness, the blacker for the unholy elusive shillings, the stiller foi the occasional sighing of the wind, for the thin, whaling sound of waters, gontly stemmed, for the moan that now and agrain floated muffled out of the hold of the ship. Twice Imogene said she must leave me ; but I could not bear to part with her. The night was our own, yea, even the ship, in her solitude wrought by the silent figures aft and the tomb-like ref>ose forward, seemed our own ; and my darling, being in her heart as loth as I to .separate, lingered yet and yet till the silver sickle of the moon had gone down, red, into the western ocean, and tho clock below had struck half-past eleven.

Then she declared it was time, indeed, for her to begone ; should Vanderdecken come on deck and find her with me he might decide to part us effectually by sendinp me forward, and forbidding me to approach the cabin end ; so, finding her growing alarmed, and hearing the quick beating of her heart in her speech, I said, " Good-night," kissing her hand, and then releasing her. She seemed to hurry, stopped, and looked behind ; I stood watching her ; seeing her stop, I held out my arms, and went to her, and she returned to me. With what love did I kisp her upturned brow, and hold her to my heart ! She was yet in my arms, when the great figure of Vanderdecken rose about the ladder, and ere 1 could release her he wae close to us, towering in shadow like some giant spirit. The start I gave caused her to turn ; she saw him, and instantly grasping iny hand drew me against the bulwark, where Wβ stood waiting for him to speak. Love will give spirit to the pitifullest recreant, and had I been the most cr.iven-hearted of men the obligation to stand between such a sweetheart as Imogeno and one whom she feared, though be stood as high as Goliath, would have converted me into a hero. But I was no coward ; I could look back to my earliest experiences and feel that with strictest confidence. Yet, spite the animating presence of Imogene, the great figure standing in front of us chilled, subdued, terrified me. Had he been mortal I could not have felt so ; nay, had his demeanour, his posture been that which intercourse with him had made familiar, I should not have suffered from the superstitious fears that held me motionless, and made my breathing laboured. Bub there was something new and frightful in the pause he made abreast of us, in the strange and menacing swinging of his arms, in the pose of his head defiantly held back, and in his eyes, which shone with a light that owed nothing to the stars, in the pallid gloom of his face. His gaze seemed to be rivetted on the ocean-line a little abaft of where we stood, and therefore did he appear to confront us. The expression in his face I could not distinguish, but I feebly discerned an aspect of distortion about the brow, and clearly made out that his under-jaw was fallen so as to let his mouth lie open, causing him to resemble one whose soul was convulsed by some hideous vision.

Iniogene pressed my hand. I looked at her, and she put her white forefinger to her mouth, saying , in accents so faint that they were more like the whispers one hears in memory than the utterance of human lips : j "Hβ is walking in his sleep. In a moment he will act a part. I have seen this thing , once before ;" and so fairily speaking she drew me lightly towards the deeper gloom near the bulwarks where the mizzen-rig-ging was. For some moments he continued standing and gazing seawards, slowly swinging his arms in a way that suggested fierce yet almost controlled distress of mind. He then started to walk, savagely patrolling the deck, sweeping past us so close as to brush us with his coat, then crossing athwartships and madly pacing the other side of the deck, sometimes stopping with a passionate, violent suddenness at the binnacle, at the card of which he seemed to stare, then with denunciatory gesture resuming his stormy striding, now lengthwise, now crosswise, now swinging his great figure into an abrupt stand to view the sea, first to starboard, then to larboard, now standing aloft, and all with airs and gestures as though he shouted orders to the crew and cried aloud to himself, though saving his swift deep breathing that, when he passed us close, sounded like the panting of bellows in angry or impatient hands, no syllable broke from him. " Some spell is upon him 1" I exclaimed. " I see how it is !—he is acting over again the behaviour that renders this ship accurst." "I saw him like this two years ago; 'twas earlier in the night," whispered Imogene. "He so scared me that I fainted." That Arents and the helmsman took notice of this strange somnambulistic behaviour in their captain I could not tell; he approached them as often as he approached us, and much of the dumb show of his rage was enacted close to them ; but so far as I could judge, from the distance at which we stood, their postures were as quiet as though they were lay figures, or passionless and insensible creatures without understandings to be touched. It was a heart-subduing spectacle beyond words to tell of. Bit by bit his temper grew, till his motions, his frenzied racings about the deck, his savage glarings aloft, his fury when, in this distemper of sleep, his perusal of the compass disappointed him, were those of a maniac. I saw the white froth on his lips as he approached us close to level a flaming glance seawards, and had he been Satan himself I could not have shrunk from him with deeper loathing and colder terror. The insanity of his wrath, its expressed by his gestures—for he was as mute as one bereft of his voice by agony— was rendered the wilder, the more striking and terrible, by the contrast of the night, the peace of it, the splendour of the stars, the silence upon the deep rising up to those luminaries like a benedictory hush! For such an infuriated figure as this you needed the theatre of a storm-tossed ship, with the billows boiling all about and over her, and the scenery of a pitchy sky torn by violet, lightning and piercing the roaring ebony of the seas with zigzag fire, and the trumpettings of the tempest deepened by a ceaseless crashing of thunder. He continued to lash himself into such a fury that, for very pity, misery, and horror, you longed to hear him cry out, for the relief expression would give to his soul, strangling in awful throes. Suddenly he fell upon his knees ; his hands were clenched, and he lifted them on high ; his face was upturned ; and as I watched him menacing the stars with infuriated gestures, I knew that even as he now showed so did he appear when he blasphemously dared his Maker. A soft gust of the midnight air blew with a soft moan through the rigging. Vanderdecken let drop his arms, swayed awhile as if he would fall, staggered to his feet, and, with his hands pressed to his eyes as though some sudden stroke of lightning had smitten him blind, camp with wavering gait, in which was still visible a sullen and disordered majesty, to the poop ladder, down which he sightlessy went, steered by the wondrous, unintelligible faculty that governs the sleep-walker. I pulled off my hat and wiped my forehead, that was damp with sweat. '' Great God !" I cried. " What a sight to behold ! What anguish is he made to sutler ! How is it that his human form Hoes not scatter, like one broken on the wheel, to the rending of such infernal passions as possess him ?" Imogcne was about to answer when on a sudden the first stroke of midnight came floating up in the cathedral note of the clock. " Hark !" she exclaimed. "It is twelve ! Arents will now be relieved by Van Vogelaar. If that malignant creature epiee meliere at this hour with you, oh, 'twould ho worse through the report he would give than if Vanderdecken himself had surprised us. Good-night, Mr. Fenton !" She quickly slipped from my grasp, and faded down the ladder. As she vanished I put my hand to my heart to subdue its beating, and whilst I thus stood a moment the last note of the clock vibrated into the stillness on deck, and scarcely less clear than had the accursed croak sounded close beside me, rose the parrot's detestable cry : " SJHp sun ill Kftßomti."

CHAPTER XXIX. WK SIGHT A DISMASTED WRECK.' Terrible as must have been the sufferings of Vanderdecken in the tragic passage through which his spirit had driven in a silent, madness of sleep, yet next morning I could perceive no trace of his frenzy in the cold and ghastly hue of his face. I found him on deck when 1 quitted my melancholy cabin, and he responded to the good morning I gave him with a touch of civility in his haughty, brooding manner that was not a little comforting to me, who had been kept awake till it was hard upon daylight by remembrance of the spectacle I had witnessed, and by apprehensions of how a person of his demoniacal passions might serve me if I should give him, or he should imagine offence. "There should be promise of a breeze, mynheer," said I, "in the shape and lay of those high clouds,' and the little -dimness you notice to windward." "Yes," he answered, darting a level glance, under his bushy, corrugated brows, into the north quarter ; *' were it not for what hath been sighted from aloft, I should be steering with my starboard tacks aboard." "What may be in the sight, sir?" I asked, dreading to hear that it was a ship. He answered, "The sparkle of a wet, black object was visible from the crosstrees at sunrise. Arente finds it already in the perspective glass from the fore-top. He reports it the hull of an abandoned ship. He may be mistaken. Your sight is keen, air ; we greatly need tobacco ; but I would not willingly lose time in running down to a vessel that may be water-logged, and therefore utterly unprofitable." " You wish me to go aloft and see what I can make of the object, sir?" " If you will be so good," he answered, with a grave inclination of the head. "Captain Vanderdecken," said I, "I should be glad to serve you in any direction. 1 only regret your courtesy will not put me to the proof." He bowed again and pointed to a telescope to which Arents had fastened a lanyard that he might carry it aloft on his back. I threw the bight over my head and walked forward, guessing now that Vanderdecken's civility was owing to his intending to make me oblige him in this way. Coming abreast of the weather fore-shrouds, 1 jumped on to an old gun, thence leaped to the rail and swung myself into the rigging, up which, however, I stepped with the utmost caution, the seizings of the ratlines looking very rotten, and the shrouds themselves so grey and worn that they seemed as old as the ship herself, and as if the generations of seamen had been employed to do nothing else but squeeze the tar out of them. There was a good-sized lubber's hole through which I easily passed, the barricades prohibiting any other entrance into the top; and when I was arrived, I found myself on a great circular platform, green as a field with moss and grass, and surrounded by a breastwork of wood to the height of my armpits, the scantling extraordinarily thick, but answering in age and appearance to the rest of the timber in the ship, with loop-holes for muskets and small cannon. The foot of the foresail having a very large curve, I had a clear view of the se*on both bows under it; and the moment I ran my naked eye from the windward to the leeward side then I saw, fair betwixt the cathead and the knigbthead, the flashing of what was unquestionably the wet side of a dismasted ship rolling to the sun. The regular coming and going of the sparkling , was like the discharge of a piece fired and ;

quickly loaded and fired again. I pointed the telescope, and the small magnification aiding my fairly keen sight, I distinctly made out the hull of a vessel of between three and four hundred tons, rolling with a very sluggish regularity and shooting out a strong blaze of light whenever the swell gave Tier streaming sides to the glory. I was pretty sure, by the power and broadness of true darting radiance, that her decks were not submerged, that indeed she would still show an indifferently good height of side above the water, and thereupon threw the glass over my back for the descent, pausing, however, to take a view of the ship from the height I occupied, and wondering not a little, with something of amusement, too, at the extraordinary figure her body offered thus surveyed. In fact, ahe was not three times as long, as she was broad, and she had the sawn-off look of a waggon down there. After every Bwimming lift of her head by the swell, the droop of her bows hove a smearing of froth into the large blue folds, that might have passed for an overflowing of goapsuds from a wash-tub ; and upon that whiteness all the forward part of her stood out in a sort of jumble of ponderous catheads, curved head-boards sinking into a well, out of which forked the massive boltsprit, as the people who fashioned it would have spelt it, with its heavy confusion of gear, yards, stays for the sprit-topmast, and the like. I had a good sight of the sails up here and perceived they were like the famous stocking of which Dr. Arbuthnot, or Pope, or one of the wits of Queen Anne's reign, wrote; that is, that though they might have been the same cloths which the Braave sheeted home when she set sail from Batavia, yet they had been so patched, so darned, and over and Over again so repaired, that to prove they were the same sails would be as nice a piece of metaphysical puzzling as to show that they were not. Yet the sun flung his light upon their mainhued dinginess, and as I looked up they swung to the heave of the ship with a hard blank staring of their breasts that seemed like the bending of an idiot's gaze at the clusters and wreaths and curls of pearly vapour over the lee horizon, and though my glance was swift, yet even in a breathless moment a confusion was wrought ;vs though the shining prismatic clouds were starting to swedp like some maelstromic brimming of feathery foam around the ship and founder her in gradual gyrations of blue ether and snow-like mist. Great God ! thought I, here, to be sure, is a place to go mad in i to lie upon this dark-green platform, to hearken to the spirit-whisperings amid this ancient cordage, to behold these darkened sails sallowly swelling towards some bloody disc of moon soaring out of a belt of sooty vapour, to listen to the voices of the fabric beneath and to the groans of her old age dying in echoes in the caverns of her stretched canvas —by my father's hand ! thought I, if I am to save my brain I muet put myself nearer to Imogene than this ; so I dropped with a loud heart through the lubber's hole, and stepped down the ratlines as fast as my fears of the soundness of the seizings would suffer me to descend. "What do you see, mynheer?" asked Vanderdecken. "The hull of a ship, sir," I replied. "She is deep in the water, but not too deep for boarding, I believe, for the sunshine finds a wide expanse to blaze out upon when she rolls."

" Well," he exclaimed, " an hour or two can make but very little difference," and he sent his impatient, imperious gaze into the blue to windward, and fell to marching the deck athwartships, opposite the tiller-nead, becoming suddenly as heedless of my presence as if I had been a brass swivel on his bulwarks. But I was less likely to be chagrined by his discourtesy than by his attention. It had, indeed, come to my never feeling so easy in my mind as when he perfectly neglected me. It was two hours and a-half after sighting the hull from the masthead that it lay visible upon the sea from the deck. Luckily, the breeze had stolen a point or two westerly, which enabled our ship to keep the wreck to leeward of our bowsprit; otherwise we should never have fetched it by two miles, without a board, and that might have ended in a week's plying to windward. The crew had long got scent of this object ahead, and, being as keen for tobacco as was ever a sharp-set stomach for victuals, they were collected in a body on the forecastle, where, in their dull, lifeless, mechanical way they stood staring and waiting Although those who had the watch on deck had been at various sorts of work when the wreck hove into view over the forecastle rail—such as making spun-yarn, sawing wood (as I supposed for the cook-room), sail-mending, splicing old running gear, and the like—yet, I remarked they dropped the several jobs just as it suited them, and I never observed that either of the mates reproved them, or that the captain noticed their behaviour; whence I concluded that the Curse had stricken the ship into a kind of little republic, wherein such discipline as was found was owing to a sort of general agreement among the men that euch work as had to be done must be done. I found myself watching the wreck with a keener interest than could ever possess the breasts of the wretched master, mates, or crew. Was any stratagem conceivable to enable me to use that halfsunk vessel as an instrument for escaping with Imogens from this Death Ship! My dearest girl came to my side whilst my brain was thus busy, and in a soft undertone I told her of what I was thinking. She listened with eager eyes. "Geoffrey," said she, "you are my captain. Command me, and I will do your bidding." "My darling,"l replied, "if you knew what a miserable, nervous creature this Death Ship has made of me, you would guess I was the one to be led, you to direct. But yonder craft will not serve us. No ! Better that little boat there than a hull which the crew, ay, and perhaps the very rats, have abandoned." [To be continued.]