safely back in Benevent. It is four years
since I parted from you. The ship in which I sailed from Marseilles was
wrecked on a coral reef. All hands were lost. The last I saw alive was
Marc Debois. He had seized a spar, and was struggling manfully for
life. There are sharks in those seas. The waves ran high, and the foam
of the breakers blinded me. I was safe on the land. I could not help
Marc, but I watched him. A great wave came. It rolled on toward my
feet.

There was a patch of blood on the water, mingling with the white foam of
the breakers, then disappearing. Poor Marc had met his fate. All was
over. I saw him no more. The spar to which he had clung was washed
ashore at my feet. I was alone, wet, cold, wretched. I envied Marc.
Shaking myself, I ran along the shore, to restore to my drenched limbs
heat and life. Then I climbed a precipitous crag--one of a line that
stretched along the shore as far as the eye could see. But I must not
become tedious with my tale.

"Go on, Pierre Crepin!" they all cried.

Well, then, I continued, the island was desolate, uninhabited. There
were fruits and berries, turtles, young birds in nests. Long times of
dry weather under a tropical sun. In this I made a fire day after day
by rubbing sticks together till I could kindle the dry leaves. Then
came seasons of wet of weeks together. In these I had no fire, and had
to subsist on berries and fruits, and the eggs of sea-fowl. I was
there, as it seemed, an age. It was three years. I had long given up
all hope of seeing Benevent or men again. My island was about nine
leagues round. On the highest hill, by the shore, I raised a mast. In
a cleft in it I struck a piece of plank. On the plank I wrote, with
white chalk--

"Au Secours! Pierre Crepin!"

This I renewed as the rains washed out my characters. At last help
came. Unshaven, ragged, unkempt, I was taken on board an American
vessel that had been driven by stress of weather far out of her course.
And I am here.

My narrative ended, I was plied with a thousand questions, and it was
not until mine host closed his doors for the night, and thrust us
good-humouredly into the street, that I was able to bid my friends
good-night, and turn my steps toward my mother's cottage--that cottage
where the dear soul awaited me with the anxiety of a mother who has
mourned her only son as lost. That cottage where the soft bed of my
boyish days, spread for me, wit