How could I ever have forgotten?
I deserved it all, all, all! To think that many a time we must have sat together on this very coop! I kissed its blistering edge at the thought, and my tears ran afresh, as though they never would stop.
Ah! how I thought of her as that cruel day's most cruel sun climbed higher and higher in the flawless flaming vault.

A pocket-handkerchief of all things had remained in my trousers pocket through fire and water; I knotted it on the old childish plan, and kept it ever drenched upon the head that had its own fever to endure as well.

Eva Denison! Eva Denison! I was talking to her in the past, I was talking to her in the future, and oh! how different were the words, the tone! Yes, I hated myself for having forgotten her; but I hated God for having given her back to my tortured brain; it made life so many thousandfold more sweet, and death so many thousandfold more bitter.
She was saved in the gig.

Sweet Jesus, thanks for that! But I--I was dying a lingering death in mid-ocean; she would never know how I loved her, I, who could only lecture her when I had her at my side.
Dying?
No--no--not yet! I must live--live--live--to tell my darling how I had loved her all the time.

So I forced myself from my lethargy of despair and grief; and this thought, the sweetest thought of all my life, may or may not have been my unrealized stimulus ere now; it was in very deed my most conscious and perpetual spur henceforth until the end.
From this onward, while my sense stood by me, I was practical, resourceful, alert.