ong time to come.

CHAPTER THREE.

EXPLORATIONS AND DISCOVERIES.

As the sun had bathed the golden cave when our castaways went to sleep,
so it flooded their simple dwelling when they awoke.

"Then," exclaims the intelligent reader, "the sun must have risen in the
west!"

By no means, good reader. Whatever man in his wisdom, or weakness, may
do or say, the great luminaries of day and night hold on the even tenor
of their way unchanged. But youth is a wonderful compound of strength,
hope, vitality, carelessness, and free-and-easy oblivion, and, in the
unconscious exercise of the last capacity, Pauline and her brothers had
slept as they lay down, without the slightest motion, all through that
night, all through the gorgeous sunrise of the following morning, all
through the fervid noontide and the declining day, until the setting sun
again turned their resting-place into a cave of gold.

The effect upon their eyelids was such that they winked, and awoke with
a mighty yawn. We speak advisedly. There were not three separate
awakenings and three distinct yawns; no, the rousing of one caused the
rousing of the others in succession so rapidly that the yawns,
commencing with Pauline's treble, were prolonged, through Otto's tenor
down to Dominick's bass, in one stupendous monotone or slide, which the
last yawner terminated in a groan of contentment. Nature, during the
past few days, had been doubly defrauded, and she, having now partially
repaid herself, allowed her captives to go free with restored vigour.
There was, however, enough of the debt still unpaid to induce a desire
in the captives to return of their own accord to the prison-house of
Oblivion, but the desire was frustrated by Otto, who, sitting up
suddenly and blinking at the sun with owlish gravity, exclaimed--

"Well, I never! We've only slept five minutes!"

"The sun hasn't set _yet_!"

Dominick, replying with a powerful stretch and another yawn, also raised
himself on one elbow and gazed solemnly in front of him. A gleam of
intelligence suddenly crossed his countenance.

"Why, boy, when we went to sleep the sun was what you may call six feet
above the horizon; now it is twelve feet if it is an inch, so that if it
be still setting, it must be setting upwards--a phenomenon of which the
records of astronomical research make no mention."

"But it _is_ setting?" retorted Otto, with a puzzled look, "for I never
heard of your astronomical searchers