here to help
ourselves.

Of our blind wanderings in that gruesome land of swamps and sand, which,
when we at last escaped from it, we learned was Florida, I must not write
here. It was months before such of us as were left crawled through into
civilisation, and it is not too much to say that every day of the time
after we parted from the wreck we carried our lives in our hands. It was
sixteen months almost to a day before I set foot once more on Peter Port
quay. For beggars cannot be choosers, and for the very clothes we stood in
we were indebted to the kind hearts who took pity on us in the American
States. We had had to wait at every point till means of forwarding us could
be found, and we were welcomed in Peter Port as men returned from the dead.
Within two hours I was scrambling up through the ferns and gorse above Port
a la Jument to the welcome that awaited me at home.

I peeped through the window before going in, and saw the table laid for
supper and my mother busy at the hearth. She turned when I entered,
supposing it was my grandfather and Krok, and then with a cry she was on my
neck.

Ah, how good it was to feel her there, and to find her unbroken by all the
terrible waiting! She had hoped and hoped, and refused to give up hoping
long after the others had done so. She told me, between smiles and tears,
that each time I went she had felt that she had probably seen me for the
last time. "But," she said quietly, "I left you in the good God's hands,
and I believed that however it was with you it would be well."

Then my grandfather and Krok came in, and my grandfather said very
fervently, "Now God be praised!" and wrung my right hand as if he could
never wring it enough, while Krok wrung the other, with eyes that stood out
of his head like marbles and yet were full of tears.

During supper I told them shortly what had befallen us, and I had so much
to tell, and they so much to hear, that we none of us supped over well, yet
none of us had probably ever enjoyed a supper like it.

Then in turn I was hungry for news, and began asking about this one and
that, intending so to come presently to Carette without baring my heart.
But my dear mother, guessing perhaps what was in me, gave me full measure.

"Jeanne Falla has a party to-night, my boy, and Carette is stopping with
her. You should go down and give them a surprise."

"I will go," I said, and jumped up at once to see if, among the things I
had left behind w