room from end to end. A reading-lamp concen-
trated all its light upon the papers on his desk;
and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the
windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a
hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a
whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not
a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth be-
low--never a sign of life but the scent of climbing
jasmine; and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me,
passed through the wide casement, to vanish out-
side in a chill and sumptuous stillness.
". . . The relations of shipwrecks in the
olden time tell us of much suffering. Often the
castaways were only saved from drowning to die
miserably from starvation on a barren coast; oth-
ers suffered violent death or else slavery, passing
through years of precarious existence with people
to whom their strangeness was an object of suspi-
cion, dislike or fear. We read about these things,
and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon
a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless,
incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in
some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all
the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of
the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever
had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I
am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers
cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost
within sight from this very window.
"He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed,
in the course of time we discovered he did not even
know that ships had names--'like Christian peo-
ple'; and when, one day, from the top of the Tal-
fourd Hill, he beheld the sea lying open to his view,
his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air of wild surprise,
as though he had never seen such a sight before.
And probably he had not. As far as I could make
out, he had been hustled together with many others
on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of
the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his sur-
roundings, too weary to see anything, too anxious
to care. They were driven below into the 'tween-
deck and battened down from the very start. It
was a low timber dwelling--he would say--with
wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his coun-
try, but you went into it down a ladder. It was
very large, very cold, damp and sombre, with places
in the manner of wooden boxes where people had to
sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all
ways at once all the time. He crept into one of
these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in
which he had left his home many days before, keep-
ing his bundle and his stick by his side. People
groaned, children cried, water dripped, the lights
went out, the walls of the place creaked, and every-
thing was being shaken so that in one's little box