“Oh, Sir Amyas Leigh, dear Sir Amyas Leigh,” blubbered poor Jack, “put out your hand, and feel where you are, and pray the Lord to forgive you for your wilfulness!”

A great trembling fell upon Amyas Leigh; half fearfully he put out his hand; he felt that he was in his hammock, with the deck beams close above his head.  The vision which had been left upon his eye-balls vanished like a dream.

“What is this?  I must be asleep?  What has happened?  Where am I?”

“In your cabin, Amyas,” said Cary.

“What?  And where is Yeo?”

“Yeo is gone where he longed to go, and as he longed to go.  The same flash which struck you down, struck him dead.”

“Dead?  Lightning?  Any more hurt?  I must go and see.  Why, what is this?” and Amyas passed his hand across his eyes.  “It is all dark—­dark, as I live!” And he passed his hand over his eyes again.

There was another dead silence.  Amyas broke it.

“Oh, God!” shrieked the great proud sea-captain, “Oh, God, I am blind! blind! blind!” And writhing in his great horror, he called to Cary to kill him and put him out of his misery, and then wailed for his mother to come and help him, as if he had been a boy once more; while Brimblecombe and Cary, and the sailors who crowded round the cabin-door, wept as if they too had been boys once more.

Soon his fit of frenzy passed off, and he sank back exhausted.

They lifted him into their remaining boat, rowed him ashore, carried him painfully up the hill to the old castle, and made a bed for him on the floor, in the very room in which Don Guzman and Rose Salterne had plighted their troth to each other, five wild years before.

Three miserable days were passed within that lonely tower.  Amyas, utterly unnerved by the horror of his misfortune, and by the over-excitement of the last few weeks, was incessantly delirious; while Cary, and Brimblecombe, and the men nursed him by turns, as sailors and wives only can nurse; and listened with awe to his piteous self-reproaches and entreaties to Heaven to remove that woe, which, as he shrieked again and again, was a just judgment on him for his wilfulness and ferocity.  The surgeon talked, of course, learnedly about melancholic humors, and his liver’s being “adust by the over-pungency of the animal spirits,” and then fell back on the universal panacea of blood-letting, which he effected with fear and trembling during a short interval of prostration; encouraged by which he attempted to administer a large bolus of aloes, was knocked down for his pains, and then thought it better to leave Nature to her own work.  In the meanwhile, Cary had sent off one of the island skiffs to Clovelly, with letters to his father, and to Mrs. Leigh, entreating the latter to come off to the island:  but the heavy westerly winds made that as impossible as it was to move Amyas on board, and the men had to do their best, and did it well enough.