“We commit these bodies to the deep.”
Here the grating was tilted, and with a dull and sullen plash the bodies sank, to appear no more till the sea gives up its dead.
“We commend their spirits to the living God who gave them.”
. . . . . .
The captain had closed the book, and a few minutes afterwards the men were going about their duties, as if there was no such thing as death and sorrow in the wide wide world.
I wish I could say that all the troubles of the good barque Boo-boo-boo were now over and done with. I wish it for this reason, that I am no lover of horrors. I neither like to read about nor to write about them. But I have an “ower true” tale to relate, and I am the last person in the world, I trust, or one of the last persons, to shirk a duty.
For a day or two, then, all went well. The wind blew fair, the waves sparkled and shone in the sunshine, as if elfin fingers were scattering their sides with diamonds.
Then suddenly the wind veared round to the west, but fell considerably.
Except on tack and half tack there was no way of making headway against it.
But to make matters worse, a fog came down upon the ship so dense that the jibboom could not be descried from the binnacle, and the men, even by the foremast, loomed out like tall and ghastly spectres.