“He got up painfully, looked at the flames, at the sea sparkling round the ship, and black, black as ink farther away; he looked at the stars shining dim through a thin veil of smoke in a sky black, black as Erebus.

“‘Youngest first,’ he said.

“And the ordinary seaman, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, got up, clambered over the taffrail, and vanished.  Others followed.  One, on the point of going over, stopped short to drain his bottle, and with a great swing of his arm flung it at the fire.  ‘Take this!’ he cried.

“The skipper lingered disconsolately, and we left him to commune alone for awhile with his first command.  Then I went up again and brought him away at last.  It was time.  The ironwork on the poop was hot to the touch.

“Then the painter of the long-boat was cut, and the three boats, tied together, drifted clear of the ship.  It was just sixteen hours after the explosion when we abandoned her.  Mahon had charge of the second boat, and I had the smallest—­the 14-foot thing.  The long-boat would have taken the lot of us; but the skipper said we must save as much property as we could—­for the under-writers—­and so I got my first command.  I had two men with me, a bag of biscuits, a few tins of meat, and a breaker of water.  I was ordered to keep close to the long-boat, that in case of bad weather we might be taken into her.

“And do you know what I thought?  I thought I would part company as soon as I could.  I wanted to have my first command all to myself.  I wasn’t going to sail in a squadron if there were a chance for independent cruising.  I would make land by myself.  I would beat the other boats.  Youth!  All youth!  The silly, charming, beautiful youth.

“But we did not make a start at once.  We must see the last of the ship.  And so the boats drifted about that night, heaving and setting on the swell.  The men dozed, waked, sighed, groaned.  I looked at the burning ship.

“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister.  A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky.  She burned furiously, mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars.  A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days.  The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph.  The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea.  At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within.