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Updated: June 19, 2025
"Why water in the grave?" she asked, with a sort of curiosity, but speaking even more harshly and abruptly than before. I suddenly began to feel provoked. "Why, there must have been water at the bottom a foot deep. You can't dig a dry grave in Volkovo Cemetery." "Why?" "Why? Why, the place is waterlogged. It's a regular marsh. So they bury them in water. I've seen it myself ... many times."
It had been snowing a little earlier in the evening, and the brief blast had swept the sky clean, so that even the brightest stars seemed sunken and waterlogged in the white floods of moonlight. Under my hand lay the city. Even the feet of the watch made no clatter on the pavements. The fresh-fallen snow masked the sound.
He encouraged the men out of his multifarious stores of learning. He related at length stories of wrecks and sufferings at sea; which, though they had long been in print, were most of them new to these poor fellows. He told them, among the rest, what the men of the Bona Dea, waterlogged at sea, had suffered twelve days without any food but a rat and a kitten yet had all survived.
There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying.
Shattered stumps of spars, waterlogged and weighed down with a thick incrustation of barnacles, the accumulated growth of years of immersion; part of the hull of a ship, so overgrown with "sea grass" as to be distinguishable as such only from the fact that the channels and channel irons with their dead-eyes, and even the frayed ends of the shroud lanyards still remained attached; a twisted and tangled-up mass of iron rods which looked as though it might at some distant period have been the paddle-wheel of a steamer, and near it the evident remains of a boiler and some machinery; the beam of a trawl-net, and bales, boxes, packing-cases, barrels, and, in short, every conceivable description of covering in which ships' cargoes are usually stowed were mixed up in inextricable confusion with heaps of coal, large stones, and other anomalous substances.
Waterlogged as she was it was no easy matter to swing her out of the current and head her upon a course. But at last he had succeeded. Having but one sail it could not have been better placed than amidships. Placed in the mainmast it was easier to maintain steerage way and at the same time it served to push the derelict forward.
The wind, also, had diminished considerably in force, blowing now from a point to the westward of north, although the waves were still rolling heavily, as they always do for some time after a storm in the southern ocean, setting in towards the land that was just faintly visible right ahead of the Nancy Bell, and whither she was now proceeding steadily, but, of course, making but very slow progress through being waterlogged forwards and possessing such small sail-power.
But my vessel, deeply laden, was already getting waterlogged, and would not sail on a wind more than four miles an hour. All hope in that quarter vanished. I then endeavoured to discover from the captain where the leaks were, that we might stop them; but he had been drinking so freely, that I could get nothing from him but Dutch courage and braggadocio.
While the lads had been talking, the appearance of the sky gave evident signs that the gale was breaking. Still the sea ran very high, and the waterlogged wreck laboured in a way which made it doubtful whether each plunge she made would not prove her last. She sunk lower and lower, and it was very evident that in a short time no part of her deck would be tenable.
The conversation took place in the Green Park, which was a favourite haunt of the colonel's. He loved to sit on a chair by the side of the lake, watching the children sailing their boats and the ducks mothering their broods. He was silent. His eyes were bent upon the efforts of a small boy to bring a little waterlogged boat to a level keel and apparently he had no other interest.
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