Again the captain looked long and earnestly; the mate looked again, and again returned the glass: 

“Poor fellows—­we may as well fill away, sir!” he said sadly.

There was still considerable sea on, and the mere launching of a boat was attended with more than ordinary danger, added to which was that to be encountered from the broken spars and fragments of wreck drifting about.  Captain Lane thought of all these dangers, and was about to give the order to “fill away the main-yard,” when something seemed to say to him: 

“There is some one in that boat!”

This impression was so strong that he felt as if it would be murder to leave the spot without making a more minute search, and he ordered the boat to be lowered at once.  Jumping into the stern sheets, four good oars well manned soon brought him within the little field of fragments, in the centre of which the boat was floating.  No wonder none of the crew was left,—­the water literally swarmed with sharks.

Standing in the bow with a boat hook, the captain warded off pieces of wreck and gradually made his way to the strange boat.

The sight there which met his eyes Captain Lane never forgot to his dying day.  When bowed down with old age, and his feeble steps were tottering on the verge of the grave, that scene came to him as vividly as on that terrible day.  Lying in the bottom of the boat was the burnt, blackened and bruised form of a man, which, with some difficulty, the captain recognized as the handsome stranger who had visited him on the previous evening.  Clinging to him, with her arms clasped tightly around his mutilated form, a clasp which even death could not break, her fair face pressed close to his blackened features, was the lifeless body of the most beautiful woman Captain Lane had ever seen.  The look of agony, of commiseration, of tenderness, of pity, of horror and despair, which was sealed upon, those lifeless features was beyond the powers of description; but the saddest spectacle of all was a child, a little girl about one year old, clinging frantically to the breast of her dead mother, and gazing silently at them in frightened wonder.

For years, Captain Lane’s eyes had not been dimmed with tears, but now the fountains of grief were opened up, and his cheeks were wet.  He carefully entered the boat, felt of each cold body, laid his hand upon each silent heart, and waited in vain for an answering signal to his touch upon the pulse.

“It is all over,” he said, and sitting down in the stern sheets of the boat, he took the child in his arms and sent his men back for sheets and shot and palm and needle and prayer-book.  “They shall have Christian burial,” declared the kind-hearted captain.

They went away and left him alone with the dead and the baby.  The infant seemed to cling to him from that moment, and the Great Father above alone knows how strangely and rapidly those cords of love were cemented between the bluff, old bachelor sea-captain and the infant.  That heart, which he had thought dead to all love since the awful day on board the English merchantman, when he saw the only being he ever loved dying, was suddenly thrilled by the tenderest emotions.  Those sweet blue eyes were upturned to his face with a glance of imploring trust, and the captain cried: