ather's uncle, who,
being wrecked "amongst the cannibals of Rarertonger," with a baker's
dozen of his shipmates, escaped the fate of his less accomplished
comrades by his skill on the jewsharp, and an especial talent for
dancing the double-shuffle, so that they gave him a hut to himself, two
wives, and all he could eat, until he broke his jewsharp, and got fat
and lazy, and then there was nothing to do but to run for it.

How Creamer's paternal relative extricated himself from his precarious
position will never be known, as, at this juncture, Ben and La Salle,
respectively, weary of playing a limited _repertoire_ of psalm-tunes on
the concertina, and reading the musty records of a long-forgotten
"_Sederunt_ of the quarterly Synod," as detailed in an old number of the
Presbyterian Witness, interrupted the prolonged passage at arms by an
invitation, to all so disposed, "to take a walk around the island."

Lund, who had misgivings as to his ability to give Creamer "a Roland for
his Oliver," rose at once, and Creamer acceding more reluctantly, the
four set off, through a narrow wood-path, to a cleared field near the
western extremity of the island.

At the verge of this field, a cliff of red sandstone, ribbed and seamed
by centuries of weather-wear and beat of sea, overlooked the ample bay
which opens into the Straits of Northumberland at their widest point.
Before them it lay covered with huge level ice-fields, broken only where
tide and storm had caused an upheaval of their edges, or a berg,
degraded and lessened of its once lordly majesty, it is true, but still
grand even in its decay, rose like a Gothic ruin amid a snow-covered and
desolate plain.

The sun was declining in the west, but his crimson rays gave warmth to
the picture, and the still air had, as it were, a foretaste of the
balmy revivifying warmth of spring. In the woods, close at hand, were
heard the harsh cawing of the crow, the shrill scream of the blue-jay,
and the garrulous chatter of many a little family of warm-furred,
pine-cone-eating little red squirrels.

Neither was animal life wanting elsewhere to complete the picture. On
the ice could be counted, in different directions, no less than
seventeen flocks of Canada geese, some of them apparently on the watch,
but the major part lying down, and evidently sleeping after their long
and wearisome migration. In a single diminutive water-hole below the
cliff, which probably marked the issue of one of t