as now pending over the castaway family which was destined to
darken their bright sky, and interrupt them in the even tenor of their
way.

Up to this time the interest, not to say delight, with which they went
about their daily avocations, the fineness of the weather, and the
romance of their situation, had prevented their minds from dwelling much
on the flight of time, and if Pauline had not remembered the Sundays by
conscientiously keeping a daily record with a pencil on a piece of bark,
not one of them would have believed it possible that two months had
elapsed since they were cast ashore.

The sanguine hope, too, which filled the breast of each, that a vessel
would certainly pass by sooner or later and take them off, prevented
their being disturbed by gloomy anticipations of a long exile, and it is
probable that they would have gone on pleasantly for a much longer time,
improving the golden cave, and exploring the reef, and developing the
resources of what Otto styled the Queendom, without much caring about
the future, had not the event above referred to come upon them with the
sudden violence of a thunder-clap, terminating their peaceful life in a
way they had never anticipated, and leading to changes which the wildest
imagination could hardly have conceived.

That event was, indeed, the arrival of a ship, but it did not arrive in
the manner that had been expected. It came in the dead of a dark night,
when the elements seemed to have declared fierce war against each other,
for it was difficult to say whether the roaring of the sea, the crashing
of the thunder, or the flashing of the forked lightning was most
tremendous.

A previous storm or two, of a mild type, having warned our trio that
Paradise had not been quite regained, even in that lovely region, they
had fitted something like a front, formed of wreckage, to the golden
cave, and this had, up to that time, formed a sufficient protection
against slight inclemencies of weather; but on this particular night the
gusts of wind were so violent, and shook the front of their dwelling so
much, that both Dominick and his brother found it impossible to sleep.
Their sister, however, lay undisturbed, because she reposed in an inner
chamber, which had been screened off with broken planks, and these not
only checked draughts, but deadened sounds.

"I'm afraid our wall will come down," said Dominick, raising himself at
last on one elbow, and gazing at the wooden erecti