"I rubbed my eyes for a time, then saw your lights through a kind of haze.
"'The lantern—quick!' I cried.
"It was handed me, and with my hand all a-shakin' I brought out my match-box.
"O God, cap'n, there was but one lucifer there! On this our lives depended, and I felt that, if I did not succeed in lightin' that lamp, I myself should go mad and throw myself into the sea, to be devoured by the shark that, all throughout this weary time, had followed in our wake. I stood the hurricane-lantern under the stern-sheets; then I put one hand holdin' the empty box inside, lest a breath of air should blow out our only hope.
"Then I struck the match. A flare at first, then only a tiny blaze of blue. I turned it round, and its light grew brighter and whiter.
"The lantern was lit, and Bill Jones seized it from me, just as I fell down in the bottom of the boat in a dead faint.
"Young Tom Ball crept aft to me, while Bill kept waving the lantern on high.
"I was all doubled up, with my chin on my breast, and but for that young fellow Tom I should have died. But he laid me flat out, and rubbed my chest with rum, and when I sighed—a sad, sobbing kind of sigh it were, so he says—he got me to swallow a mouthful, and just as we got alongside your ship, cap'n, I was able to sit up.
"And I knew we was saved, though I didn't know then that the two hands lying asleep, like, in the bottom of the boat, was dead."