The darkness was impenetrable.  It was no longer that of heaven, but of the nether world, or so it seemed to this dazed soul, plunged suddenly from dreams of exile into the valley of the shadow of death.  And such a death!  As he realised its horrors, as he felt the chill of night and the oncoming storm strike its piercing fangs into his marrow, and knew that his existence and the hope of ever again seeing the dear old face at the fireside rested upon the strength of his will and the tenacity of his life-clutch, he felt his heart fail, and the breath that was his life cease in a gurgle of terror.  But he clung on, and, though no comfort came, still clung, while vague memories of long-ago shipwrecks, and stories told in his youth of men, women, and children tossing for hours on a drifting plank, flashed through his benumbed brain, and lent their horror to his own sensations of apprehension and despair.

He wanted to live.  Now that the dread spectre had risen out of the water and had its clutch on his hair, he realised that the world held much for him, and that even in exile he might work and love and enjoy God’s heaven and earth, the green fields and the blue sky.  Not such skies as were above him now.  No, this was not sky that overarched him, but a horrible vault in which the clouds, rushing in torn masses, had the aspect of demons stooping to contend for him with those other demons that with long arms and irresistible grip were dragging at him from below.  He was alone on a whirling spar in the midst of a midnight ocean, but horror and a pitiless imagination made this conflict more than that of the elements, and his position an isolation beyond that of man removed from his fellows.  He was almost mad.  Yet he clung.

Suddenly a better frame of mind prevailed.  The sky was no lighter, save as the lightning came to relieve the overwhelming darkness by a still more overwhelming glare, nor were the waves less importunate or his hold on the spar more secure; but the horror seemed to have lifted, and the practical nature of the man reasserted itself.  Other men had gone through worse dangers than these and survived to tell the tale, as he might survive to tell his.  The will was all—­will and an indomitable courage; and he had will and he had courage, or why had he left his home to dare a hard and threatening future purely from a sentiment of gratitude?  Could he hold on long enough, daylight would come; and if, as he now thought possible, he had been thrown into the sea within twenty hours after leaving Sutherlandtown, then he must be not far from Cape Cod, and in the direct line of travel from New York to Boston.  Rescue would come, and if the storm which was breaking over his head more and more furiously made it difficult for him to retain his hold, it certainly would not wreck his spar or drench him more than he was already drenched, while every blast would drive him shoreward.  The clinging was all, and filial love would make him