ere, so lost, so strange am I,
so wild is everything. But I must not murmur"; and she crossed her hands
upon her breast and bowed her head.

* * * * *

The two young men led a riotous life; they rioted with the ocean, with
the winds, with the level island, with the sunshine and the racing
clouds. They sailed over to the reef daily and plunged into the surf;
they walked for miles along the beach, and ran races over its white
floor; they hunted down the center of the island, and brought back the
little brown deer who lived in the low thicket on each side of the
island's backbone. The island was twenty miles long and a mile or two
broad, with a central ridge of shell-formed rock about twenty feet in
height, that seemed like an Appalachian chain on the level waste; below,
in the little hollows on each side, spread a low tangled thicket, a few
yards wide; and all the rest was barren sand, with movable hills here
and there--hills a few feet in height, blown up by the wind, and changed
in a night. The only vegetation besides the thicket was a rope-like vine
that crept over the sand, with few leaves far apart, and now and then a
dull purple blossom--a solitary tenacious vine of the desert, satisfied
with little, its growth slow, its life monotonous; yet try to tear it
from the surface of the sand, where its barren length seems to lie
loosely like an old brown rope thrown down at random, and behold, it
resists you stubbornly. You find a mile or two of it on your hands,
clinging and pulling as the strong ivy clings to a stone wall; a giant
could not conquer it, this seemingly dull and half-dead thing; and so
you leave it there to creep on in its own way, over the damp,
shell-strewn waste. One day Carrington came home in great glory; he had
found a salt marsh. "Something besides this sand, you know--a stretch of
saw-grass away to the south, the very place for fat ducks. And somebody
has been there before us, too, for I saw the mast of a sail-boat some
distance down, tipped up against the sky."

"That old boat is ourn, I guess," said Melvyna. "She drifted down there
one high tide, and Pedro he never would go for her. She was a mighty
nice little boat, too, ef she was cranky."

Pedro smiled amiably back upon his spouse, and helped himself to another
hemisphere of pie. He liked the pies, although she was obliged to make
them, she said, of such outlandish things as figs, dried oranges, and
pomegranat