there with physical obstacles which men like myself had brought together for my undoing. The Eternal could never have willed this thing! I could not and I would not perish thus. And I grew strong in insolence of self-trust; and I laughed aloud as I dashed the sluggish water from side to side.
“Then came an emotion of pity for myself—of wild regret; of sorrow, Oh, infinite for a fate so desolate, a doom so dreary, so heart-sickening! You may laugh at the contradiction if you will, sir, but I felt that I could sacrifice my own life on the instant, to redeem another fellow-creature from such a place of horror, from an end so piteous. My soul and my vital spirit seemed in that desperate moment to be separating; while one in parting grieved over the deplorable fate of the other.
“And then I prayed! I prayed, why or wherefore I know not. It was not from fear. It could not have been in hope. The days of miracles are past, and there was no natural law by whose providential interposition I could be saved. I did not pray; it prayed of itself, my soul within me.
“Was the calmness that I now felt torpidity—the torpidity that precedes dissolution to the strong swimmer who, sinking from exhaustion, must at last add a bubble to the wave as he suffocates beneath the element which now denied his mastery? If it were so, how fortunate was it
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