Newton had resigned himself to his fate.  He ceased from further exertion, except such as was necessary to keep him above water a little longer.  Throwing himself on his back, he appealed to Heaven for pardon, as he floated away with the stream.  That Newton had as few errors and follies to answer for as most people, is most certain; yet even the most perfect soon run up a long account.  During our lives our sins are forgotten, as is the time at which they were committed; but when death is certain, or appears to be so, it is then that the memory becomes most horribly perfect, and each item of our monstrous bill requires but a few seconds to be read, and to be acknowledged as too correct.  This is the horror of death; this it is which makes the body struggle to retain the soul, already pluming herself and rustling her wings, impatient for her flight.  This it is which constitutes the pang of separation, as the enfeebled body gradually relaxes its hold, and—­all is over, at least on this side of the grave.

Newton’s strength was exhausted; his eyes were fixed on the clear blue sky, as if to bid it farewell; and, resigned to his fate, he was about to give over the last few painful efforts which he was aware could only prolong, not save his life, when he received a blow on his shoulders under the water.  Imagining that it proceeded from the tail of a shark, or of some other of the ravenous monsters of the deep, which abound among these islands, and that the next moment his body would be severed in half, he uttered a faint cry at the accumulated horror of his death; but the next moment his legs were swung round by the current, and he perceived, to his astonishment, that he was aground upon one of the sand-banks which abounded on the reef, and over which the tide was running with the velocity of a sluice.  He floundered, then rose, and found himself in about one foot of water.  The ebb-tide was nearly finished; and this was one of the banks which never showed itself above water, except during the full and change of the moon.  It was now about nine o’clock in the morning, and the sun shone with great power.  Newton, faint from want of sustenance, hardly knew whether to consider this temporary respite as an advantage.  He knew that the tide would soon flow again, and he felt that his strength was too much spent to enable him to swim back to the islet which he had missed when he had attempted to reach it, and which was more than two miles from the bank upon which he then stood.  What chance had he, then, but to be swept away by the return of the tide?  He almost regretted that it had not been a shark instead of the sand-bank which had struck him; he would then have been spared a few hours of protracted misery.