come to touch pricks like
a thorn.

Gilliatt found himself immediately in the presence of obstacles.

In order to raise the engine of the Durande from the wreck in which it
was three-fourths buried, with any chance of success--in order to
accomplish a salvage in such a place and in such a season, it seemed
almost necessary to be a legion of men. Gilliatt was alone; a complete
apparatus of carpenters' and engineers' tools and implements were
wanted. Gilliatt had a saw, a hatchet, a chisel, and a hammer. He wanted
both a good workshop and a good shed; Gilliatt had not a roof to cover
him. Provisions, too, were necessary, but he had not even bread.

Any one who could have seen Gilliatt working on the rock during all that
first work might have been puzzled to determine the nature of his
operations. He seemed to be no longer thinking either of the Durande or
the two Douvres. He was busy only among the breakers: he seemed absorbed
in saving the smaller parts of the shipwreck. He took advantage of every
high tide to strip the reefs of everything which the shipwreck had
distributed among them. He went from rock to rock, picking up whatever
the sea had scattered--tatters of sail-cloth, pieces of iron, splinters
of panels, shattered planking, broken yards--here a beam, there a chain,
there a pulley.

At the same time he carefully surveyed all the recesses of the rocks. To
his great disappointment none were habitable. He had suffered from the
cold in the night, where he lodged between the stones on the summit of
the rock, and he would gladly have found some better refuge.

Two of those recesses were somewhat extensive. Although the natural
pavement of rock was almost everywhere oblique and uneven it was
possible to stand upright, and even to walk within them. The wind and
the rain wandered there at will, but the highest tides did not reach
them. They were near the Little Douvre, and were approachable at any
time. Gilliatt decided that one should serve him as a storehouse, the
other as a forge.

With all the sail, rope-bands, and all the reef-earrings he could
collect, he made packages of the fragments of wreck, tying up the wood
and iron in bundles, and the canvas in parcels. He lashed all these
together carefully. As the rising tide approached these packages, he
began to drag them across the reefs to his storehouse. In the hollow of
the rocks he had found a top rope, by means of which he had been able to
haul even the lar