What fate was this that had set her
to such profitless labour on the uttermost shores of "Tragedy"? What
history lay behind, past, or, as it were, never to come? What gladness
too high for earth had nearly once been hers? Her sea-mound took
strange shapes in the gloom--light foliage of stone, dark heaviness of
granite, wherein rumour played of all that restless rustling; small
cries, vast murmurings from those green meadows, old as night.
I turned, even ran away, at last. I found my boat in the gloaming
where I had left her, safe and sound, except that all the doctor's
good things had been nosed and tumbled by some hungry beast in my
absence. I stood and thought vacantly of Crusoe, and pig, and guns.
But what use to delay? I got in.
If it were true, as the excellent doctor had informed me, that seamen
reported islands not far distant from these shores, chance might bear
me blissfully to one of these. And if not true ... I turned a rather
startled face to the water, and made haste not to think. Fortune
pierces deep, and baits her hooks with sceptics. Away I went, bobbing
mightily over the waves that leapt and wrestled where sea and river
met.
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