some unfretting task or hale pastime. With sheath-knife and sail-needle he
made of his mainsail a handsome tent, using the mainboom for his ridge-
pole, and finishing it just in time for the first night of rain--when,
nevertheless, he lost all his coffee!

He did not waste toil. He hoarded its opportunities as one might husband
salt on the mountains or water in the desert, and loitering in well
calculated idleness between thoughts many and things of sea and shore
innumerable, filled the intervals from labor to labor with gentle
entertainment. Skyward ponderings by night, canny discoveries under foot
by day, quickened his mind and sight to vast and to minute significancies,
until they declared an Author known to him hitherto only by tradition.
Every acre of the barren islet grew fertile in beauties and mysteries, and
a handful of sand at the door of his tent held him for hours guessing the
titanic battles that had ground the invincible quartz to that crystal meal
and fed it to the sea.

I may be more rhetorical than he was, but he made all the more of these
conditions while experiencing them, because he knew they could not last
out the thirty days, nor half the thirty, and took modest comfort in a
will strong enough to meet all present demands, well knowing there was one
exigency yet to arise, one old usurer still to be settled with who had not
yet brought in his dun.



V


It came--began to come--in the middle of the second week. At its familiar