ness
and misery. His childish mind could record facts, but not their reason
or coherency. He was in a new, an unknown world. His mother had filled
his old; where was she now? Why had she tied him into that thing and
thrown him from her into the darkness and wet? Strange things had
happened, which he dimly remembered. He had been roused from his sleep,
dressed, and taken out of doors in the dark, where there were frightful
crashing noises, shoutings of men, and crying of women and other
children. He had cried himself, from sympathy and terror, until his
mother had thrown him away. Had he been bad? Was she angry? And after
that--what was the rest? He was hungry and thirsty now. Why did she
not come? He would go and find her.

With the life-buoy hanging about his waist--though of cork, a heavy
weight for him--he toddled along the beach to where it ended at a
massive ridge of rock that came out of the wooded country inland and
extended into the lagoon as an impassable point. He called the chief
word in his vocabulary again and again, sobbing between calls. She was
not there, or she would have come; so he went back, glancing fearfully
at the dark woods of palm and undergrowth. She might be in there, but
he was afraid to look. His little feet carried him a full half-mile in
the other direction before the line of trees and bushes reached so
close to the beach as to stop him. Here he sat down, screaming
passionately and convulsively for his mother.

Crying is an expense of energy which must be replenished by food. When
he could cry no longer he tugged at the straps and strings of the
life-buoy. But they were wet and hard, his little fingers were weak,
and he knew nothing of knots and their untying, so it was well on
toward midday before he succeeded in scrambling out of the meshes, by
which time he was famished, feverish with thirst, and all but
sunstruck. He wandered unsteadily along the beach, falling
occasionally, moaning piteously through his parched, open lips; and
when he reached the obstructing ridge of rock, turned blindly into the
bushes at its base, and followed it until he came to a pool of water
formed by a descending spray from above. From this, on his hands and
knees, he drank deeply, burying his lips as would an animal.

Instinct alone had guided him here, away from the salt pools on the
beach, and impelled him to drink fearlessly. It was instinct--a
familiar phase in a child--that induced him to put pebbles,