The morning came; I woke, aroused by Salva’s song, from troubled sleep; and, as I rose to a sitting posture, a troop of sea-birds that had been swooping overhead, fled with a fiend-like screaming.

The mother and child were already consuming their scant allowance of food.  Ada Greene was standing self-poised, swaying like a slender reed with the motion of the raft, so as never to lose her balance, like a young acrobat, with her folded arms, her floating hair, and fair Aurora face, uplifted to the day.

Over the raft were scattered groups of men taking their morning meal; but, as before, the stalwart form of Christian Garth was at the helm, or rather, mast and rudder merged in one, which he controlled with calm, sagacious power.

“Is there a ship in the distance, that you gaze so earnestly?” I asked of the young girl as I put back my hair that had clustered thickly over my face in my uneasy slumber, and followed eagerly the direction of her eyes.

“Oh! no; only a school of dolphins; but it is so pretty!  Some came quite near just now; the men were harpooning them; but if we had them we could not cook them, you know, on this miserable contrivance.”

“One we should be very grateful for, Ada, since it is all that lies between us and destruction!” I answered, sorrowfully, for the levity of her spirit grieved and shocked me.

“I don’t know about that; I think we might as well have gone down at once as stay here, and be roasted and starved.  How hot it is to-day!  What would I not give for a good glass of ice-water!  Don’t look so shocked; we shall be saved, of course.  I am not the least afraid about that, for Mr. Garth says we must see a ship before evening.  Don’t you mark the flag flying at the mast-head?  He brought it on board on purpose, so that they might not mistake our country (the packets, I mean), and give us the go-by as that Spanish vessel did!  But they do say that was a pirate; and that, instead of sitting on a plank, we should have been walking a plank by this time, had they rescued us.  I’m rather glad they didn’t, though, after all—­things couldn’t be much worse than they are, could they, now?—­There, I came very near falling, I declare!”

The moans of the sick woman at my side became almost constant toward noon; and she was obliged to surrender her infant wholly to my charge, for the haemorrhage of the day before had returned, and she was fast drifting into unconsciousness.  “Water, water!” was the only intelligible cry that left her lips, and that we had to give was warm and brackish, from the occasional lapping of the sea against the barrels, into which it oozed insensibly.

The sun shone down hot and brazen, from the lurid heavens, covered with filmy clouds, so equally overspreading it that a thin, gray veil seemed to interpose between us and its scorching rays, scarcely tempering them by its diaphanous medium.