placed on it as if to keep it down. As for the lug-sail belonging to
the dinghy, it was never seen again.

There is humour sometimes in a cyclone, if you can only appreciate it;
no other form of air disturbance produces such quaint effects. Beside
the great main whirlpool of wind, there are subsidiary whirlpools, each
actuated by its own special imp.

Emmeline had felt Hannah nearly snatched from her arms twice by these
little ferocious gimlet winds; and that the whole business of the great
storm was set about with the object of snatching Hannah from her, and
blowing him out to sea, was a belief which she held, perhaps, in the
innermost recesses of her mind.

The dinghy would have been utterly destroyed, had it not heeled over
and sunk in shallow water at the first onset of the wind; as it was,
Dick was able to bail it out at the next low tide, when it floated as
bravely as ever, not having started a single seam.

But the destruction amidst the trees was pitiful. Looking at the woods
as a mass, one noticed gaps here and there, but what had really
happened could not be seen till one was amongst the trees. Great,
beautiful cocoa-nut palms, not dead, but just dying, lay crushed and
broken as if trampled upon by some enormous foot. You would come
across half a dozen lianas twisted into one great cable. Where
cocoa-nut palms were, you could not move a yard without kicking against
a fallen nut; you might have picked up full-grown, half-grown, and wee
baby nuts, not bigger than small apples, for on the same tree you will
find nuts of all sizes and conditions.

One never sees a perfectly straight-stemmed cocoa-palm; they all have
an inclination from the perpendicular more or less; perhaps that is why
a cyclone has more effect on them than on other trees.

Artus, once so pretty a picture with their diamond-chequered trunks,
lay broken and ruined; and right through the belt of mammee apple,
right through the bad lands, lay a broad road, as if an army, horse,
foot, and artillery, had passed that way from lagoon edge to lagoon
edge. This was the path left by the great fore-foot of the storm; but
had you searched the woods on either side, you would have found paths
where the lesser winds had been at work, where the baby whirlwinds had
been at play.

From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven, rose a
perfume of blossoms gathered and scattered, of rain-wet leaves, of
lianas twisted and broken and oozing their