Beneath it lay the sea, like a copper shield, smooth and glowing, seething like a boiling caldron, with its level foam, for the long, low-rolling billows lifted themselves but lazily from Ocean’s breast, and assumed no distinctness of form or motion.  Not the faintest breeze came to relieve the stifling closeness of the atmosphere, or lift the collapsed sail, or furled flag, that clung around our mast.  The air shimmered visibly around us, as though undergoing some transformation from the heat, some culinary process, through which it was to be rendered unfit for human lips to breathe.  Birds flew low and heavily around the raft, as though their wings met such resistance as fish find in water, alighting occasionally to pick up languidly morsels of rejected food.

Still the old negro’s crooning hymns went on, recommenced with morning light.  To my sad heart, the refrain bore a mournful significance: 

  “In the land of the New Jerusalem
  There shall be no more sea.”

She sat, a wrinkled hag, with a leering, repulsive face, with her feet planted firmly on her mattress, her knees elevated, her long, ape-like arms closely embracing these—­her fingers, strung with brass and silver rings, intertwined with snake-like flexibility.

On her head was the inevitable bright-colored handkerchief, the badge of her race, or rather of her condition in those days, and she wore the decent, blue-cotton frock, which marked her for a plantation-negro.  Large hoops were in her flat, enormous ears, that seemed to suspend her shoulders as they touched them, drawn up and narrowed as these were, even beyond their natural hideousness, by her attitude, one which she maintained as stolidly as a dervish.

“You must help us,” I said, at last, when the crisis came, and affairs waxed desperate.  “You must take the child, at least, and care for him.  See, it requires two persons to sustain his dying mother—­one to wet her lips, one—­”

“’Deed, honey,” she interrupted, coolly, “you must ’scuse me dis oncst; I has jus’ as much to do as I kin posomply ‘complish, in keepin’ of myself dry, comfable, and singin’ ob my hyme-toones.  We has all to take our chances dis time, an’ do for our own selves, black and white; an’ I don’t see none ob my own white folks on dis raf’, wich I is mighty proud of.  Dar, now!  I does b’leve dat is a ship sail way off dar.  Does you see it, honey?”

And she pointed to a large white gull, skimming the main at some distance.  Disgusted with her selfishness, I vouchsafed her no farther notice at the time, and her crooning went on during the whole period of the bitter death-struggle of that poor sufferer, whose name I never knew, but whose little, deformed waif, the orphan of the raft, remained my heritage.

“You will take care of him,” she had said to me, in her last conscious moments, “my baby-boy, my little—­” the name died on her lips, and she never spoke again.