382 
THE DESPERATE ALTERNATIVE. 
to aid him, to be strangled, suffocated, mangled, destroyed^ 
while the inferior animals around him swim majestically 
away, or hover on fearless wings over the sullen and 
hopeless struggle ? Is time to end now, as far as we are 
concerned? — we who have still such strong frames, such 
glowing blood, such vivid recollections of the past, such 
yearnings of hope for the future, such nei've to struggle 
against this hideous fate could we but grasp it in some 
tangible form ? 
Is that bright sun now shining upon us for the last 
time? — us, whose path it was created to light? May not 
some wandering breeze reach us in its wayward course, 
to fill our idle sails and urge us forward while yet a few 
short yards exist between us and that rocky pile ? Alas, 
no ! The stern and lowering brow contracts in hopeless 
despair over a broad expanse of calm and polished ocean, 
while backward — slowly backward — we drop against the 
struggling screw. 
We can no longer measure our yards by hundreds. 
Time is drawing to a close, and space seems shrinking 
into nothing as though they journeyed to a common 
grave. A strong arm might have cast a stone into that 
yawning gulf, when a single order, the first that had 
been given for apparently an age, told us that the despe- 
rate choice had been made. 
To be thrown upon the sharp rocks of the sunken 
reef by the boiling ocean which swept over them, as- 
sured us of at least a sunlit grave; while the dark depths 
of the dismal-looking cavern, rendered doubly dark and 
gloomy by the contrast with the snowy foam which 
frothed around its mouth, resembled in their inky hue 
