He took care of me well, though; and it was only through his kind care that they were able to bring me round again.

They told me afterwards that I was in a most pitiable state of emaciation--a skeleton, they said, with only fragments of burnt, blistered skin covering my poor bones!" "And the others," inquired Fritz,--"did they recover too ?" "No; not one of the three was alive when Captain Brown's ship came across our boat.

I was the only one who had any life remaining.

They thought me a corpse, too, and would have left me to die with the rest, if it hadn't been for the captain, who declared there was breath still in my apparently dead body, and kindly had me hoisted on board and attended to." "But how was it you never wrote home ?" said Fritz after a bit, the recollection of what he had gone through overcoming Eric and making him silent for a moment.
"How could I, when the first land I touched, since I was picked up in the ocean south of the Cape, was when I stepped ashore here last week!" "I can't make that out," said Fritz, puzzled at this.
"Why," replied the other, "you must know that Captain Brown's ship, the _Pilot's Bride_, is a whaling vessel; and she was on her usual cruise for her fishing ground in the Southern Ocean, when I was rescued.

If there had been a boatload of us, or had our skipper been alive, perhaps Captain Brown would have put in to the Cape to land us and so give news of the loss of our ship; but, as there was only me, a boy, and I was for days insensible and unable to give him any particulars about the vessel I belonged to, of course he continued his voyage.