When he bad lain a good while in all the agony of suspense, the
boy tumbled headlong into his apartment, with such noise, that he
believed the mast had gone by the board; and starting upright in
his bed, asked, with all the symptoms of horror, what was the cause
of that disturbance? The boy, half-stunned by his fall, answered
in a dolorous tone, "I'm come to put up the dead-lights." At the
mention of dead-lights, the meaning of which he did not understand,
the poor governor's heart died within him: he shivered with despair,
his recollection forsaking him, he fell upon his knees in the bed,
and, fixing his eyes upon the book which was in his hand, began
to pronounce aloud with great fervour, "The time of a complete
oscillation in the cycloid, is to the time in which a body would
fall through the axis of the cycloid DV, as the circumference of
a circle to its diameter."
He would in all likelihood have proceeded with the demonstration
of this proposition, had he not been seized with such a qualm
as compelled him to drop the book, and accommodate himself to the
emergency of his distemper: he therefore stretched himself at full
length, and, putting up ejaculations to Heaven, began to prepare
himself for his latter end, when all of a sudden the noise above
was intermitted; and as he could not conceive the cause of this
tremendous silence, he imagined that either the men were washed
overboard, or that, despairing of safety, they had ceased to oppose
the tempest.
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