"He will soon know his God, and learn that his God knows him!" murmured
the cockswain to himself. As he yet spoke, the wreck of the Ariel
yielded to an overwhelming sea, and, after an universal shudder, her
timbers and planks gave way, and were swept towards the cliffs, bearing
the body of the simple-hearted cockswain among the ruins.
CHAPTER XXV.
"Let us think of them that sleep
Full many a fathom deep,
By the wild and stormy steep,
Elsinore!"
_Campbell_.
Long and dreary did the hours appear to Barnstable, before the falling
tide had so far receded as to leave the sands entirely exposed to his
search for the bodies of his lost shipmates. Several had been rescued
from the wild fury of the waves themselves; and one by one, as the
melancholy conviction that life had ceased was forced on the survivors,
they had been decently interred in graves dug on the very margin of that
element on which they had passed their lives. But still the form longest
known and most beloved was missing, and the lieutenant paced the broad
space that was now left between the foot of the cliffs and the raging
ocean, with hurried strides and a feverish eye, watching and following
those fragments of the wreck that the sea still continued to cast on the
beach. Living and dead, he now found that of those who had lately been
in the Ariel, only two were missing. Of the former he could muster but
twelve, besides Merry and himself, and his men had already interred more
than half that number of the latter, which, together, embraced all who
had trusted their lives to the frail keeping of the whale-boat.
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