only by the rising sun; and the State, the churches, the peopled empires, war, and the rumours of war, and the voices of the arts, all gone silent as in the days ere they were yet invented.  Such were the conditions of my new experience in life, of which (if I had been able) I would have had all my confreres and contemporaries to partake:  forgetting, for that while, the orthodoxies of the moment, and devoted to a single and material purpose under the eye of heaven.

Of the nature of our task, I must continue to give some summary idea.  The forecastle was lumbered with ship’s chandlery, the hold nigh full of rice, the lazarette crowded with the teas and silks.  These must all be dug out; and that made but a fraction of our task.  The hold was ceiled throughout; a part, where perhaps some delicate cargo was once stored, had been lined, in addition, with inch boards; and between every beam there was a movable panel into the bilge.  Any of these, the bulkheads of the cabins, the very timbers of the hull itself, might be the place of hiding.  It was therefore necessary to demolish, as we proceeded, a great part of the ship’s inner skin and fittings, and to auscultate what remained, like a doctor sounding for a lung disease.  Upon the return, from any beam or bulkhead, of a flat or doubtful sound, we must up axe and hew into the timber:  a violent and—­from the amount of dry rot in the wreck—­a mortifying exercise.  Every night saw a deeper inroad into the bones of the Flying Scud—­more beams tapped and hewn in splinters, more planking peeled away and tossed aside—­and every night saw us as far as ever from the end and object of our arduous devastation.  In this perpetual disappointment, my courage did not fail me, but my spirits dwindled; and Nares himself grew silent and morose.  At night, when supper was done, we passed an hour in the cabin, mostly without speech:  I, sometimes dozing over a book; Nares, sullenly but busily drilling sea-shells with the instrument called a Yankee Fiddle.  A stranger might have supposed we were estranged; as a matter of fact, in this silent comradeship of labour, our intimacy grew.

I had been struck, at the first beginning of our enterprise upon the wreck, to find the men so ready at the captain’s lightest word.  I dare not say they liked, but I can never deny that they admired him thoroughly.  A mild word from his mouth was more valued than flattery and half a dollar from myself; if he relaxed at all from his habitual attitude of censure, smiling alacrity surrounded him; and I was led to think his theory of captainship, even if pushed to excess, reposed upon some ground of reason.  But even terror and admiration of the captain failed us before the end.  The men wearied of the hopeless, unremunerative quest and the long strain of labour.  They began to shirk and grumble.  Retribution fell on them at once, and retribution multiplied the grumblings.  With every day it took harder driving to keep them to the daily drudge; and we, in our narrow boundaries, were kept conscious every moment of the ill-will of our assistants.