Another tranquil night gave me another tranquil night’s rest.  I call the last tranquil, as it proved to be in one sense, though I was sorely troubled with dreams.  Had I been suffering for nourishment, I certainly should have dreamed of food; but, such not being the case, my thoughts took the direction of home and friends.  Much of the time, I lay half asleep and half awake; then my mind would revert to my sister, to Lucy, to Mr. Hardinge, and to Clawbonny—­which I fancied already in the possession of John Wallingford, who was triumphing in his ownership, and the success of his arts.  Then I thought Lucy had purchased the place, and was living there with Andrew Drewett, in a handsome new house, built in the modern taste.  By modern taste, I do not mean one of the Grecian-temple school, as I do no think that even all the vagaries of a diseased imagination that was suffering under the calamities of shipwreck, could induce me to imagine Lucy Hardinge silly enough to desire to live in such a structure.

Towards morning, I fell into a doze, the fourth or fifth renewal of my slumbers that night; and I remember that I had that sort of curious sensation which apprises us itself, it was a dream.  In the course of the events that passed through my mind, I fancied I overheard Marble and Neb conversing.  Their voices were low, and solemn, as I thought; and the words so distinct, that I still remember every syllable.

“No, Neb,” said Marble, or seemed to say, in a most sorrowful tone, one I had never heard him use even in speaking of his hermitage.  “There is little hope for Miles, now.  I felt as if the poor boy was lost when I saw him swept away from me, by them bloody spars striking adrift, and set him down as one gone from that moment.  You’ve lost an A. No. 1. master, Mister Neb, I can tell you, and you may sarve a hundred before you fall in with his like ag’in.”

“I nebber sarve anoder gentleum; Misser Marble,” returned the black; “dat as sartain as gospel.  I born in ’e Wallingford family, and I lib an’ die in ’e same family, or I don’t want to lib and die, at all.  My real name be Wallingford, dough folk do call me Clawbonny.”

“Ay, and a slim family it’s got to be!” rejoined the mate.  “The nicest, and the handsomest, and the most virtuous young woman in all York State, is gone out of it, first:  I knew but little of her; but, how often did poor Miles tell me all about her; and how he loved her, and how she loved him, and the like of all that, as is becoming; and something in the way that I love little Kitty, my niece you know, Neb, only a thousand times more; and hearing so much of a person is all the same, or even better than to know them up and down, if a body wants to feel respect with all his heart.  Secondly, as a person would say, now there’s Miles, lost too, for the ship is sartainly gone down, Neb:  otherwise, she would have been seen floating hereabouts, and we may log him as a man lost overboard.”