n rocks and ashes of
the drab colour of the crater. The spots of verdure that he had
succeeded in producing on the Summit, not only relieved and refreshed
his eyes, but they were truly delightful as aids to the view, as well as
grateful to Kitty, which poor creature had, by this time, cropped them
down to a pretty short herbage. This Mark knew, however, was an
advantage to the grass, making it finer, and causing it to thicken at
the roots. The success of this experiment, the annoyance to his eyes,
and a feverish desire to be doing, which succeeded the disappearance of
Botts, set Mark upon the project of sowing grass-seed over as much of
the plain of the crater as he thought he should not have occasion to use
for the purposes of tillage. To work he went then, scattering the seed
in as much profusion as the quantity to be found in the ship would
justify. Friend Abraham White had provided two barrels of the seed, and
this went a good way. While thus employed a heavy shower fell, and
thinking the rain a most favourable time to commit his grass-seeds to
the earth, Mark worked through the whole of it, or for several hours,
perspiring with the warmth and exercise.

This done, a look at the garden, with a free use of the hoe, was the
next thing undertaken. That night Mark slept in his hammock, under the
crater-awning, and when he awoke in the morning it was to experience a
weight, like that of lead in his forehead, a raging thirst, and a
burning fever. Now it was that our poor solitary hermit felt the
magnitude of his imprudence and the weight of the evils of his peculiar
situation. That he was about to be seriously ill he knew, and it behoved
him to improve the time that remained to him, to the utmost. Everything
useful to him was in the ship, and thither it became indispensable for
him to repair, if he wished to retain even a chance for life. Opening an
umbrella, then, and supporting his tottering legs by a cane, Mark
commenced a walk of very near a mile, under an almost perpendicular sun,
at the hottest season of the year. Twenty times did the young man think
he should be compelled to sink on the bare rock, where there is little
question he would soon have expired, under the united influence of the
fever within and the burning heat without. Despair urged him on, and,
after pausing often to rest, he succeeded in entering the cabin, at the
end of the most perilous hour he had ever yet passed.

No words of ours can describe th