as comfortable as possible in the cave, and from its snug
shelter defy wind and wave.

He had heard Dunham say that these sudden storms were diurnal in their
nature, and frequently of great fury and destructiveness, so the
following morning he moved all his belongings into the grotto, as he
liked best to call the cave, and set up housekeeping in a manner that no
hurricane, however severe, could interfere with.

"Nobody can say I am in the way here," he said--for he had gotten into
the habit of talking to himself--surveying, as he spoke, his rocky home,
and smiling sadly. "I am neither a bother nor a burden to any one now.
I'm alone on an uninhabited island, and may die here, for all I can tell
to the contrary; but I don't know but what that is better than being
nagged by Aunt Susan, or driven about on the ocean, with nothing but an
old schooner between one and the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. It's just
eighteen days since I landed on this island, and I was five days on the
schooner--that makes twenty-three--and I'm alive yet. If I have to stay
here a year, that will not be very long. I've provision enough to last
that length of time, and it will give me an opportunity to grow and to
think. I'll read all Captain Thorne's books, and there's a good many of
them, including works on navigation, history and science. I'll fish and
row when the weather is fine, and when it isn't I'll amuse myself in
enlarging the grotto. I'll make a collection of all the plants and
flowers I find on the land and all the shells and seaweeds I find in the
sea, or that may drift on the shore. I've a whole island that I may
honestly call my own, a box of candles, plenty of matches, four cans of
oil, a lamp and a lantern, a good boat, and lots of other things
besides; so I am pretty well off, after all, and ought not to grumble at
the hard luck which has befallen me."

And Frank _did_ try hard not to grumble; but, with the sea beating
eternally around his rocky home, and no change anywhere, day after day,
save in the scudding clouds and the waning of the old and the rising of
the new moon, he grew very weary of his utter loneliness, and there came
a time when he would have given his life to hear again a human voice and
see again a human face.

CHAPTER XIV.

DANGEROUS VISITORS.

Every hour in the day Frank scanned the horizon in hopes of seeing a
sail. He felt that he could not be more than a hundred miles from the
Bay Islands, and not altog