This was not lost on him:  he removed the belt for his own use:  he then found it was not only a belt, but a receptacle; it was nearly full of small, hard substances that felt like stones.

When he had taken it off the body, he felt a compunction.  “Ought he to rob the dead, and expose it to be swept into the sea at the first wave, like a dead dog?”

He was about to replace the belt, when a middle course occurred to him.  He was a man who always carried certain useful little things about him, viz., needles, thread, scissors, and string.  He took a piece of string, and easily secured this poor light skeleton to the raft.  The belt he strapped to the rail, and kept for his own need.

And now hunger gnawed him.  No food was near.  There was nothing but the lovely sea and sky, mosaic with color, and that grim, ominous skeleton.

Hunger comes and goes many times before it becomes insupportable.  All that day and night, and the next day, he suffered its pangs; and then it became torture, but the thirst maddening.

Towards night fell a gentle rain.  He spread a handkerchief and caught it.  He sucked the handkerchief.

This revived him, and even allayed in some degree the pangs of hunger.

Next day was cloudless.  A hot sun glared on his unprotected head, and battered down his enfeebled frame.

He resisted as well as he could.  He often dipped his head, and as often the persistent sun, with cruel glare, made it smoke again.

Next day the same:  but the strength to meet it was waning.  He lay down and thought of Rosa, and wept bitterly.  He took the dead man’s belt, and lashed himself to the upright.  That act, and his tears for his beloved, were almost his last acts of perfect reason:  for next day came the delusions and the dreams that succeed when hunger ceases to torture, and the vital powers begin to ebb.  He lay and saw pleasant meadows with meandering streams, and clusters of rich fruit that courted the hand and melted in the mouth.

Ever and anon they vanished, and he saw grim death looking down on him with those big cavernous eyes.

By and by, whether his body’s eye saw the grim skeleton, or his mind’s eye the juicy fruits, green meadows, and pearly brooks, all was shadowy.

So, in a placid calm, beneath a blue sky, the raft drifted dead, with its dead freight, upon the glassy purple, and he drifted, too, towards the world unknown.

There came across the waters to that dismal raft a thing none too common, by sea or land—­a good man.

He was tall, stalwart, bronzed, and had hair like snow, before his time, for he had known trouble.  He commanded a merchant steamer, bound for Calcutta, on the old route.

The man at the mast-head descried a floating wreck, and hailed the deck accordingly.  The captain altered his course without one moment’s hesitation, and brought up alongside, lowered a boat, and brought the dead, and the breathing man, on board.