it was far more in accordance with the fitness of things for a dying man’s surroundings than such scenes as I have witnessed in the forecastles of merchant ships when poor sailors lay a-dying.  I remember well once, when I was second officer of a large passenger ship, going in the forecastle as she lay at anchor at St. Helena, to see a sick man.  Half the crew were drunk, and the beastly kennel in which they lived was in a thick fog of tobacco-smoke and the stale stench of rum.  Ribald songs, quarrelling, and blasphemy made a veritable pandemonium of the place.  I passed quietly through it to the sick man’s bunk, and found him—­dead!  He had passed away in the midst of that, but the horror of it did not seem to impress his bemused shipmates much.

Here, at any rate, there was quiet and decorum, while all that could be done for the poor sufferer (not much, from ignorance of how he was injured) was done.  He was released from his pain in the afternoon of the second day after the accident, the end coming suddenly and peacefully.  The same evening, at sunset, the body, neatly sewn up in canvas, with a big lump of sandstone secured to the feet, was brought on deck, laid on a hatch at the gangway, and covered with the blue, star-spangled American Jack.  Then all hands were mustered in the waist, the ship’s bell was tolled, and the ensign run up halfway.

The captain was still too ill to be moved, so the mate stepped forward with a rusty old Common Prayer-book in his hands, whereon my vagrant fancy immediately fastened in frantic endeavour to imagine how it came to be there.  The silence of death was over all.  True, the man was but a unit of no special note among us, but death had conferred upon him a brevet rank, in virtue of which be dominated every thought.  It seemed strange to me that we who faced death so often and variously, until natural fear had become deadened by custom, should, now that one of our number lay a rapidly-corrupting husk before us, be so tremendously impressed by the simple, inevitable fact.  I suppose it was because none of us were able to realize the immanence of Death until we saw his handiwork.  Mr. Count opened the book, fumbling nervously among the unfamiliar leaves.  Then he suddenly looked up, his weather-scarred face glowing a dull brick-red, and said, in a low voice, “This thing’s too many fer me; kin any of ye do it?  Ef not, I guess we’ll hev ter take it as read.”  There was no response for a moment; then I stepped forward, reaching out my hand for the book.  Its contents were familiar enough to me, for in happy pre-arab days I had been a chorister in the old Lock Chapel, Harrow Road, and had borne my part in the service so often that I think even now I could repeat the greater part of it memoriter.  Mr. Count gave it me without a word, and, trembling like a leaf, I turned to the “Burial Service,” and began the majestic sentences, “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord.”  I did not