th
watching through the night and thinking about the ship and little Ruth
Bellenden's loneliness in this place of mystery, and far worse than
mystery, I'd forgotten all about meal-times, and never once had asked
myself where breakfast was to come from. But now the long faces of my
shipmates brought me to a remembrance of it, and when little Dolly Venn
cried, "Oh, captain, I am so hungry!" I began to realize what a parlous
plight we were in and what a roundabout road we must tread to get out
of it. Lucky for us, the old Frenchman, who had stood all this time
like a statue gazing out over the desolate sea, now bobbed up again,
good Samaritan that he was, and catching Master Dolly's complaint, he
spoke of breakfast on his own account.

"Ah! you hungry, you thirst, messieurs; sailor-man always like
that. Your ship gone? Never mind, he shall come back again, to-day,
to-morrow, one, two, three day--pray God it be not longer, shipmate,
pray God!"

[Illustration: A picturesque old figure standing there.]

I thought him a fine, picturesque old figure, standing there on the
headland with his long hair streaming in the wind like a woman's, and
his brawny arms outstretched as though he would call the ship back to
us from the lonely ocean. Truth to tell, the place was one to fill any
man with awe. Far as the eye could see, the great waste was white with
the foam of its breaking seas; the headland itself stood up a thousand
feet like some mighty fortress commanding all the deep. Far below us
were the green valleys of the island, the woods we had raced through
last night; pastures with little white houses dotted about on them; the
bungalow itself wherein Ruth Bellenden lived. No picture from the
gallery of a high tower could have been more beautiful than that
strange land with the wild reefs lying about it and the rollers
cascading over them, and the black glens above which we stood, and the
great circle of the water like some measureless basin which the whole
earth bounded. I did not wonder that old Clair-de-Lune was silent when
he looked down upon a scene so grand. It seemed a crime to speak of
food and drink in such a place; and yet it was of these that Peter
Bligh must go on talking.

"We'll do the prayin', shipmate, if you'll do the cookin'," cried he,
hopefully; "as for that--you speak like a wise man. 'Tis wonderful easy
to pray on a full stomach! There isn't a hunger or a thirst this side
of 'Frisco which I would not