The two physicians, like all victims of accidents, the objects of really touching solicitude, were assigned seats against the warmest wall, dividing the cabin from the engine-room.  Captain Butor served the strong hot soup, and Mr. Wendler, chief engineer, a rotund little mariner, in an attempt to enliven the shipwrecked men, cautiously ventured a joke or two even before the roast was served.  He came from Lindenau near Leipzig, and the rest of the crew teased him for his Low German.

“Don’t talk,” said the captain to Wilhelm and Frederick.  “Just eat, drink, and sleep.”

At first they were inclined to take his advice, but in the course of the meal, after one of the sailors had served an immense cut of roast beef, and the captain had carved it, and they had washed the meat down with red wine, their spirits rose from moment to moment.

Bulke appeared at the door showing evidences of the royal banquet to which he and the sailors of the Roland had been treated by the sailors of the Hamburg.  Notwithstanding his condition, pardonable enough in the circumstances, he would not go to sleep without first receiving instructions from Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick, before whom he stood in military attitude, hand to his cap, awaiting orders.

It was decided that the sailor-nurse and another sailor of the Hamburg should go on night duty, since all the men from the Roland needed rest and sleep.

Though Frederick’s and Doctor Wilhelm’s spirits rose visibly, they never referred to the sinking of the Roland.  It was too tremendous a thing, too dreadful, too near for any of the survivors, except the sailors, to speak of it without intense emotion.  It was like a dull weight on their souls.  Whatever Wilhelm and Frederick said related merely to their difficulties in the life-boat, or to the trip on the Roland before it overstepped that moment in eternity which determined its awful fate.

“Captain,” said Frederick, “you don’t know how astonishing it is to be raised from the dead.  Conceive a man who has taken definite leave of everything that was dear to him in life, who has felt the rattle in his throat, and received extreme unction, and death, death itself, has settled on his flesh and limbs.  I still feel death in my joints.  And yet I am sitting here in safety, in the pleasant lamplight, almost as in a circle of friends and relatives.  I am sitting in the cosiest home, with the difference that I still cannot get myself to look upon you”—­they were the captain, the engineer, the boatswain, and the first mate—­“as something so insignificant as mere men.”

“When we sighted the Hamburg”, said Wilhelm, “I had just made my last will and testament.  You see I don’t give myself up for lost as quickly as my friend, Doctor von Kammacher.  When your ship gradually grew from the size of a pinhead to the size of a full-grown pea, all of us who could, screamed at the top of our voices.  We nearly burst our throats screaming.  And when your Hamburg attained the size of a walnut, and we realised we had been sighted, your ship flamed in my eyes like a huge diamond or ruby, and to me the east from which you came shone more brilliantly than the west, where the sun was still shining above the horizon.  All of us howled like watch-dogs.”