banished, and only the acquired habit of the chase enabled her, almost
mechanically, to secure meat to support life. Fortunately, those especial
sights and sounds of demons which had haunted her imagination during the
first days and nights on the island, did not recur; but the wild beasts
gathered round her the more when there was only one gun to alarm them; and
she once shot three bears in a day,--one a white bear, of which she
secured the skin.

What imagination can depict the terrors of those lonely days and still
lonelier nights? Most persons left as solitary tenants of an island have
dwelt, like Alexander Selkirk, in regions nearer the tropics, where there
was at least a softened air, a fertile soil, and the Southern Cross above
their heads; but to be solitary in a prolonged winter, to be alone with
the Northern Lights,--this offered peculiar terrors. To be ice-bound, to
hear the wolves in their long and dreary howl, to protect the very graves
of her beloved from being dug up, to watch the floating icebergs, not
knowing what new and savage visitor might be borne by them to the island,
what a complication of terror was this for Marguerite!

For two years and five months in all she dwelt upon the Isle of Demons,
the last year wholly alone. Then, as she stood upon the shore, some Breton
fishing-smacks, seeking codfish, came in sight. Making signals with fire
and calling for aid, she drew them nearer; but she was now dressed in furs
only, and seemed to them but one of the fancied demons of the island.
Beating up slowly and watchfully toward the shore, they came within
hearing of her voice and she told her dreary tale. At last they took her
in charge, and bore her back to France with the bearskins she had
prepared; and taking refuge in the village of Nautron, in a remote
province (Perigord), where she could escape the wrath of Roberval, she
told her story to Thevet, the explorer, to the Princess Marguerite of