to steady his voice into a sort of solemnity--"if you are in a
hurry, there's nothing like a good yacht for a man in a hurry."

"No doubt you're right," said MacIan, and dashed past him in despair.
The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the top of the
hill behind him. Turnbull had already ducked under the intoxicated
gentleman's elbow and fled far in front.

"No, but look here," said Mr. Wilkinson, enthusiastically running after
MacIan and catching him by the sleeve of his coat. "If you want to hurry
you should take a yacht, and if"--he said, with a burst of rationality,
like one leaping to a further point in logic--"if you want a yacht--you
can have mine."

Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him. "We are really in the
devil of a hurry," he said, "and if you really have a yacht, the truth
is that we would give our ears for it."

"You'll find it in harbour," said Wilkinson, struggling with his speech.
"Left side of harbour--called _Gibson Girl_--can't think why, old
fellow, I never lent it you before."

With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his face in
the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flying
companion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went
through a crisis of instantaneous casuistry, in which it may be that he
decided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can profess
no doubt. Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told the
tale; ten minutes afterwards he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into
the yacht called the _Gibson Girl_ and had somehow pushed off from the
Isle of St. Loup.

XII. THE DESERT ISLAND

Those who happen to hold the view (and Mr. Evan MacIan, now alive and
comfortable, is among the number) that something supernatural, some
eccentric kindness from god or fairy had guided our adventurers through
all their absurd perils, might have found his strongest argument perhaps
in their management or mismanagement of Mr. Wilkinson's yacht. Neither
of them had the smallest qualification for managing such a vessel; but
MacIan had a practical knowledge of the sea in much smaller and quite
different boats, while Turnbull had an abstract knowledge of science and
some of its applications to navigation, which was worse. The presence
of the god or fairy can only be deduced from the fact that they never
definitely ran into anything, either a boat, a rock, a quicksand, or a
man-of-war. Apart from t