world if you only look
alive and don't get flurried."

"Very good," said Jack, and as he said so his pipe went out; so he
knocked out the ashes and refilled it.

Next morning our hero rowed away with his three men, and soon discovered
the creek of which his friend had spoken. Here he found the sloop, a
clumsy "tub" of about twenty tons burden, and here Jack's troubles
began.

The _Fairy_, as the sloop was named, happened to have been beached
during a very high tide. It now lay high and dry in what once had been
mud, on the shore of a land-locked bay or pond, under the shadow of some
towering pines. The spot looked like an inland lakelet, on the margin
of which one might have expected to find a bear or a moose-deer, but
certainly not a sloop.

"Oh! ye shall nevair git him off," said Francois Xavier, one of the
three men--a French-Canadian--on beholding the stranded vessel.

"We'll try," said Pierre, another of the three men, and a burly
half-breed.

"Try!" exclaimed Rollo, the third of the three men--a tall, powerful,
ill-favoured man, who was somewhat of a bully, who could not tell where
he had been born, and did not know who his father and mother had been,
having been forsaken by them in his infancy. "Try? you might as well
try to lift a mountain! I've a mind to go straight back to
Kamenistaquoia and tell Mr Murray that to his face!"

"Have you?" said Jack Robinson, in a quiet, peculiar tone, accompanied
by a gaze that had the effect of causing Rollo to look a little
confused. "Come along, lads, we'll begin at once," he continued, "it
will be full tide in an hour or so. Get the tackle ready, Francois; the
rest of you set to work, and clear away the stones and rubbish from
under her sides."

Jack threw off his coat, and began to work like a hero--as he was. The
others followed his example; and the result was that when the tide rose
to its full height the sloop was freed of all the rubbish that had
collected round the hull; the block tackle was affixed to the mast; the
rope attached to a tree on the opposite side of the creek; and the party
were ready to haul. But although they hauled until their sinews
cracked, and the large veins of their necks and foreheads swelled almost
to bursting, the sloop did not move an inch. The tide began to fall,
and in a few minutes that opportunity was gone. There were not many
such tides to count on, so Jack applied all his energies and ingenuity
to the work. By the