t best to go
south, because the further south you go the warmer the water gets. When
I swum two days, and was plumb tuckered out, I come to an island. The
waves was dashing on it fearful, and I knew if I tried to land I'd be
dashed to flinders. It knocked all the hope out of me, and I made up my
mind to take off my life preserver and dive to the bottom of the sea to
knock my brains out on the rocks. But, ladies and gents, before I dived
I had another look at my book, hoping to find something to comfort a
dying man. I turned to page 201."

Eliph' Hewlitt found the page, and pointed to the heading with his
finger.

"'Five Hundred Ennobling Thoughts from the World's Greatest Authors,
including the Prose and Poetical Gems of All ages,'" he read. "There
they were-sixty-two solid pages of them, with vingetty portraits of the
authors. I read No. 285:

"As Thou has made Thy world without, Make Thou more fair my world
within,' et cetery."

"Whittier, J. G., commonly called the poet of liberty, born 1807, died
1892'--with a complete sketch of his life, a list of his most popular
pieces, and a history of his work on behalf of the slave.

"I was much comforted by this," said Eliph' Hewlitt, "and I run over
the pages this way, thinking of what I had read, when I hit on page
927: 'Geography of Land and Sea.' I skipped ten pages telling in
an interesting manner of the five great continents, their political
division, mountains, lakes, and plains, their vegetable inhabitants
and animals, their ancient and modern history, et cetery, and I come
to 'Islands, Common, Volcanic, and Coral'; and on page 940 I read that
coral islands are often surrounded by a reef on which the waves dash,
but that there is usually a quiet lagoon between the reef and the
island, with somewhere an opening from the sea into the lagoon.

"When I read that," said Eliph', closing the book, "I shut up my book
and swum round until I come to the opening, which was there, just
like the book said it would be, and I swum across the lagoon, and fell
exhausted on the beach. I was played out, and I had swallered too much
water. I would have died right there, but I thought of my book, and
I turned to the index, where every subject known to the vast realm of
knowledge is set down alphabetically, from 'A' to 'Z', twenty thousand
references in all, dealing with every subject from the time of Adam to
the present day, including, in the new and revised edition just from
the