Page:The crater; or, Vulcan's peak.djvu/138

 132 THE CRATER; the cabin, at the end of the most perilous hour he had ever yet passed. No words of ours can describe the grateful sense of coolness, in spite of the boiling blood in his veins, that Mark Woolston experienced when he stepped beneath the shade of the poop-deck of the Rancocus. The young man knew that he was about to be seriously ill, and his life might depend on the use he made of the next hour, or half-hour, even. He threw himself on a settee, to get a little rest, and while there he endeavoured to reflect on his situation, and to remember what he ought to do. The medicine-chest always stood in the cabin, and he had used its contents too often among the crew, not to have some knowledge of their general nature and uses. Potions were kept prepared in that depository, and he staggered to the table, opened the chest, took a ready-mixed dose of the sort he believed best for him, poured water on it from the filterer, and swallowed it. Our mate ever afterwards be lieved that draught saved his life. It soon made him deadly sick, arid produced an action in his whole system For an hour he was under its influence, when he was en abled to get into his berth, exhausted and literally unable any longer to stand. How long he remained in that berth, or near it rather for he was conscious of having crawled from it in quest of water, and for other purposes, on several occasions but, how long he was confined to his cabin, Mark Woolston never knew. The period was certainly to be measured by days, and he sometimes fancied by weeks. The first probably was the truth, though it might have been a fortnight. Most of that time his head was light with fever, though there were intervals when reason was, at least partially, restored to him, and he became painfully conscious of the horrors of his situation. Of food and water he had a sufficiency, the filterer and a bread-ba^ being quite near him, and he helped himself often from the first, in particular; a single mouthful of the ship s biscuit commonly proving more than he could swallow, even after it was softened in the water. At length he found himself indisposed to rise at all, and he certainly remained eight- andrforty hours in his berth, without quitting it, and almost without sleeping, though most of the time in a sort of doze.