The Ocean Waifs: A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea

by Mayne Reid

Little William loved Lilly Lalee with such love as a lad may feel for one of his own age,—a love perhaps the sweetest in life, if not the most lasting.

Inspired by this juvenile passion, and by the apprehensions he had for its object, the boy-sailor did not sleep very soundly.

Fortunate that it was so; else that brilliant flame that

near the mid-hours of night glared athwart the deck of the Catamaran might not have awakened him; and had it not done so, neither he nor his three companions might ever again have looked upon human face except their own, and that only to see one another expire in the agonies of death.

There was a flame far lighting up the sombre surface of the ocean that shone upon the sleepy Catamarans. Gleaming in the half-closed eye of the sailor-lad, it awoke him.

Starting up, he beheld an apparition, which caused him surprise, not unmingled with alarm. It was a ship beyond doubt,—or the semblance of one,—but such as the sailor-lad had never before seen.

She appeared to be on fire. Vast clouds of smoke were rising up from her decks, and rolling away over her stern, illuminated by columns of bright flame that jetted up forward of her foremast, almost to the height of her lower shrouds. No man unaccustomed to such a sight could have looked upon that ship without supposing that she was on fire.

Little William should have been able to judge of what he saw. Unfortunately for himself, the spectacle of a ship on fire was not new to him. He had witnessed the burning of the bark which had borne him into the middle of the Atlantic, and left him where he now was, in a position of extremest peril.

But the memory of that conflagration did not assist him in determining the character of the spectacle now before his eyes. On the decks of the Pandora he had seen men endeavouring to escape from the flames, in every attitude of wild terror. On the ship now in sight he beheld the very reverse. He saw human beings standing in front of the column of fire, not only unconcerned at its proximity, but apparently feeding the flames!