140 TEAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



mend as to enable us to choose our own course. But 

 our distance was each moment increasing, and the 

 night was waxing darker continually. A few more 

 minutes, and the lights were hidden from us ; and 

 we were left simply and literally without any know- 

 ledge of our position, on the Indian Ocean. The sea 

 had got up prodigiously, the wind blew harder than 

 ever, and the night was as dark as pitch. Though 

 she was flying before the wind, we could not keep 

 the sea out of her, it washed in over her quarter 

 every few minutes, and it was all that we could do to 

 keep her free by bailing. Happily we had a couple 

 of buckets with us, that served the turn well. 



I shudder when I look back to this part of that 

 fearful night. Later on in the season of our peril we 

 did not feel so acutely the horrors of our position, 

 because our sensibilities had been then pretty well 

 exhausted by the struggle for existence. So little 

 hope remained at last, that our spirits scarcely re- 

 tained the vitality necessary for suffering. "VVe were 

 as though already dead, and already taken away from 

 living pains and feelings. But with the earlier part 

 of the evening are connected associations of far more 

 active pain I mean during that part when I had not 

 resigned hope. I know that there is a theory current 

 that the living spirit never resigns hope ; that a 

 man sinking alone in the midst of the Atlantic, or 

 bowed down for the stroke of the descending guillo- 

 tine, never believes it to be impossible that he shall 



