he crew to find place for settlement.

Barely has the topsail dipped over the watery sky before breakers begin
to thunder on the sand reefs. Air and earth lash to fury. Sails are
torn from the ship of the marquis. His {24} masts go overboard, and the
vessel is driven, helpless as a chip in a maelstrom, clear back to the
ports of France. Here double misfortune awaits La Roche. His old
patrons of the court are no longer powerful. He is thrown in prison by a
rival baron.

In vain the colonists strain tired eyes for a sail at sea. Days become
weeks, weeks months, summer autumn; and no boat came back. As winter
gales assailed the sea, sending the sand drifting like spray, the
convicts built themselves huts out of driftwood, and scooped beds for
themselves in the earth like rabbit burrows. Of food there was plenty.
The people had their fishing lines; and the stock, left by the Baron de
Lery long ago, had multiplied and now overran the island. Wild fowl,
too, teemed on the inland lake; and foxes, which must have drifted ashore
on the ice float of spring, ran wild through the sedge.

Like Robinson Crusoe cast on a desert isle, the desperate people fought
their fate. Traps were set for the foxes, snares for the birds, and
scouts kept tramping from end to end of the island for sight of a sail.
Racked with despair and anxiety, these outcasts of civilization soon fell
to bitter quarreling. Traps were found rifled. Dead men lay beside the
looted traps; and, doubtless, not a few men lost their lives in spring
when the ice floes drifted down with the seal herds, and the men gave mad
chase from ice pan to ice pan for seal pelts to make clothing. Spring
wore to summer. The graves on the sand banks increased. For a second
winter the dreary snowfall wrapped the island in a mantle white as death
sheet. Then came the same weary monotony,--the frenzied seal hunt over
the blood-stained floes; the long summer days with the drone of the tide
on the sand banks; the men mad with hope at sight of a sail peak over the
far wave tops, only to be plunged in despair as the fisher boat passed
too far for signal; the fading of the grasses to russet in the sad autumn
light; then snowfall again--and despair.

Five years passed before La Roche could aid his people; and the pilot who
went to their rescue won himself immortal contempt by robbing the
castaways of their furs. Word of the {25} rescue came to the ears of the
court. Royalty c