and Ailie's box placed there. All this and
sundry other pieces of work were executed by the young sailor and his
little friend with an amount of cheerful pleasantry that showed they
had, in the engrossing interest of their pursuit, totally forgotten the
fact that they were cast away on a sandbank on which were neither food
nor water, nor wood, except what was to be found in the wrecked ship,
and around which for thousands of miles rolled the great billows of the
restless sea.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

LIFE ON THE SANDBANK--AILIE TAKES POSSESSION OF FAIRYLAND--GLYNN AND
BUMBLE ASTONISH THE LITTLE FISHES.

In order that the reader may form a just conception of the sandbank on
which the crew of the _Red Eric_ had been wrecked, we shall describe it
somewhat carefully.

It lay in the Southern Ocean, a little to the west of the longitude of
the Cape of Good Hope, and somewhere between 2000 and 3000 miles to the
south of it. As has been already remarked, the bank at its highest
point was little more than a few feet above the level of the ocean, the
waves of which in stormy weather almost, and the spray of which
altogether, swept over it. In length it was barely fifty yards, and in
breadth about forty. Being part of a coral reef, the surface of it was
composed of the beautiful white sand that is formed from coral by the
dashing waves. At one end of the bank--that on which the ship had
struck--the reef rose into a ridge of rock, which stood a few feet
higher than the level of the sand, and stretched out into the sea about
twenty yards, with its points projecting here and there above water. On
the centre of the bank at its highest point one or two very small blades
of green substance were afterwards discovered. So few were they,
however, and so delicate, that we feel justified in describing the spot
as being utterly destitute of verdure. Ailie counted those green blades
many a time after they were discovered. There were exactly thirty-five
of them; twenty-six were, comparatively speaking, large; seven were of
medium size, and two were extremely small--so small and thin that Ailie
wondered they did not die of sheer delicacy of constitution on such a
barren spot. The greater part of the surface of the bank was covered
with the fine sand already referred to, but there were one or two spots
which were covered with variously-sized pebbles, and an immense number
of beautiful small shells.

On such a small and barren spo