In the present instance, the eyes were wide open, white, prominent, and
glazed like those of a dead fish; the hair, which was remarkably fine,
and had been worn in long ringlets, amongst which a large gold earring
glittered, the poor fellow having been a nautical dandy of the first
water was drenched and clotted into heavy masses with the death--sweat,
and had fallen back on the deck from his forehead, which was well
formed, high, broad and massive. His nose was transparent, thin, and
sharp, the tense skin on the bridge of it glancing in the silver light,
as if it had been glass. His mouth was puckered on one side into
angular wrinkles, like a curtain drawn up awry, while a clotted stream
of black gore crept from it sluggishly down his right cheek, and
coagulated in a heap on the deck. His lower jaw had fallen, and there
he lay agape with his mouth full of blood.
His legs, indeed his whole body below his loins, where the fracture of
the spine had taken place, rested precisely as they had been arranged
after he died; but the excessive swelling and puffing out of his broad
chest, contrasted shockingly with the shrinking of the body at the pit
of the stomach, by which the arch of the ribs was left as well defined
as if the skin had been drawn over a skeleton, and the distortion of the
muscles of the cheeks and throat evinced the fearful strength of the
convulsions which had preceded his dissolution. It was evident, indeed,
that throughout his whole person above the waist, the nervous system had
been utterly shattered; the arms, especially, appeared to have been
awfully distorted, for when crossed on his breast, they had to be
forcibly fastened down at the wrists by a band of spun--yam to the
buttons of his jacket.
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