Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/199

Rh ; all but Holden. If the reader here begins to imagine that he is now romancing, it should be remembered that Holden is a man of uncommon vitality. At the age of ninety-one he shows the same tenacity of life as he tells of himself in the South Seas over sixty years ago. He has already "held on' thirty years longer than the most of his generation, and is perhaps the only survivor of that race of sailors in the South Seas.

It came on night. Holden sat in the stern sheets to manage a little sail that he had on the mast. He was "the only live one there." The others were dying, or waiting death, and only breathing, nor could be aroused from their lethargy. "What can I do?' he thought. "Here is the boat and all, and I can not leave them alone; but is it possible that I can keep awake all this night?" But this he determined to attempt. He gathered up the sheet and brought it aft, and got a steering oar. There rose now a light wind, that increased to a gentle and delightful breeze. He brought the sail toward the wind free. This was the sixteenth night on the sea, and during which he had scarcely slept. But he held the boat to her course, and amused himself listening to the sound of the water as the boat glided over the ripples.

The musings of this solitary man in a boat with a company who might all be but corpses, on a tropical sea, and not knowing where he was going, could not be but strange, and Mr. Holden is either as good a romancer as the Lakeside bard, or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" has been equaled by sober fact. The night seemed the longest he had ever spent, even in the South Seas, and it almost needed the assurance of the dawn streaking up at last in the east that he was not himself the dying or dead. It was a morning of extreme beauty, and sunrise on the tropical sea is a soul-stirring sight in clear weather. This was doubly and tenfold more so to Holden