When I returned again to life, the same uproar, the same confused and violent movements, shook and deafened me; and presently, to my other pains and distresses, there was added the sickness of an unused landsman on the sea.  In that time of my adventurous youth, I suffered many hardships; but none that was so crushing to my mind and body, or lit by so few hopes, as these first hours aboard the brig.

I heard a gun fire, and supposed the storm had proved too strong for us, and we were firing signals of distress.  The thought of deliverance, even by death in the deep sea, was welcome to me.  Yet it was no such matter; but (as I was afterwards told) a common habit of the captain’s, which I here set down to show that even the worst man may have his kindlier side.  We were then passing, it appeared, within some miles of Dysart, where the brig was built, and where old Mrs. Hoseason, the captain’s mother, had come some years before to live; and whether outward or inward bound, the Covenant was never suffered to go by that place by day, without a gun fired and colours shown.

I had no measure of time; day and night were alike in that ill-smelling cavern of the ship’s bowels where, I lay; and the misery of my situation drew out the hours to double.  How long, therefore, I lay waiting to hear the ship split upon some rock, or to feel her reel head foremost into the depths of the sea, I have not the means of computation.  But sleep at length stole from me the consciousness of sorrow.

I was awakened by the light of a hand-lantern shining in my face.  A small man of about thirty, with green eyes and a tangle of fair hair, stood looking down at me.

“Well,” said he, “how goes it?”

I answered by a sob; and my visitor then felt my pulse and temples, and set himself to wash and dress the wound upon my scalp.

“Ay,” said he, “a sore dunt*.  What, man?  Cheer up!  The world’s no done; you’ve made a bad start of it but you’ll make a better.  Have you had any meat?”

     * Stroke.

I said I could not look at it:  and thereupon he gave me some brandy and water in a tin pannikin, and left me once more to myself.

The next time he came to see me, I was lying betwixt sleep and waking, my eyes wide open in the darkness, the sickness quite departed, but succeeded by a horrid giddiness and swimming that was almost worse to bear.  I ached, besides, in every limb, and the cords that bound me seemed to be of fire.  The smell of the hole in which I lay seemed to have become a part of me; and during the long interval since his last visit I had suffered tortures of fear, now from the scurrying of the ship’s rats, that sometimes pattered on my very face, and now from the dismal imaginings that haunt the bed of fever.

The glimmer of the lantern, as a trap opened, shone in like the heaven’s sunlight; and though it only showed me the strong, dark beams of the ship that was my prison, I could have cried aloud for gladness.  The man with the green eyes was the first to descend the ladder, and I noticed that he came somewhat unsteadily.  He was followed by the captain.  Neither said a word; but the first set to and examined me, and dressed my wound as before, while Hoseason looked me in my face with an odd, black look.