II


It is absurdly difficult to get help in this world. If a lady
puts her head out of a window and yells "Police," she is
considered funny, or if a man from the very bottom of his soul
calls for help, he is commonly supposed to be drunk. Thus if,
cast away upon an island, you should wave your handkerchief to
people passing in a boat, they would imagine that you wanted
to be friendly, and wave back; or, if they were New York
aldermen out for a day's fishing in the Sound, call you names.
And so it was with Margaret and Aladdin. With shrill piping
voices they called tearfully to a party sailing up the river
from church, waved and waved, were answered in kind, and
tasted the bitterest cup possible to the Crusoed.

Then after much wandering in search of the boat it got to be
hunger-time, and two small stomachs calling lustily for food
did not add to the felicity of the situation.

With hunger-time came dusk, and afterward darkness, blacker
than the tall hat of Margaret's father. For at the last
moment nature had thought better of the fine weather which man
had been enjoying for the past month, and drawn a vast curtain
of inkiness over the luminaries from one horizon even unto the
other, and sent a great puff of wet fog up the valley of the
river from the ocean, so that teeth chattered and the ends of