s and sighs with internal agitations. And in the midst of
all this are a dozen of us. We are lean and wretched, and our bones show
through our tight-stretched skins. We do not sing and chatter and laugh.
We play no pranks. For once our volatile and exuberant spirits are
hopelessly subdued. We make plaintive, querulous noises, look at one
another, and cluster close together. It is like the meeting of the
handful of survivors after the day of the end of the world.

This event is without connection with the other events in the swamp.
How we ever managed to cross it, I do not know, but at last we came out
where a low range of hills ran down to the bank of the river. It was our
river emerging like ourselves from the great swamp. On the south bank,
where the river had broken its way through the hills, we found many
sand-stone caves. Beyond, toward the west, the ocean boomed on the bar
that lay across the river's mouth. And here, in the caves, we settled
down in our abiding-place by the sea.

There were not many of us. From time to time, as the days went by, more
of the Folk appeared. They dragged themselves from the swamp singly, and
in twos and threes, more dead than alive, mere perambulating skeletons,
until at last there were thirty of us. Then no more came from the swamp,
and Red-Eye was not among us. It was noticeable that no children had
survived the frightful journey.

I shall not tell in detail of the years we lived by the sea. It was
not a happy abiding-place. The air was raw and chill, and we suffered
continually from coughing and colds. We could not survive in such an
environment. True, we had children; but they had little hold on life
and died early, while we died faster than new ones were born. Our number
steadily diminished.

Then the radical change in our diet was not good for us. We got few
vegetables and fruits, and became fish-eaters. There were mussels and
abalones and clams and rock-oysters, and great ocean-crabs that were
thrown upon the beaches in stormy weather. Also, we found several kinds
of seaweed that were good to eat. But the change in diet caused us
stomach troubles, and none of us ever waxed fat. We were all lean and
dyspeptic-looking. It was in getting the big abalones that Lop-Ear was
lost. One of them closed upon his fingers at low-tide, and then the
flood-tide came in and drowned him. We found his body the next day,
and it was a lesson to us. Not another one of us was ever caught in the