they were babies. And they were little troubled by the turn of the
breeze, save that it would delay their homecoming. They tried in vain
to make headway. Slowly, but surely they were driven back from land,
till they could see that there was no other thing but just to turn
about and let her run back to Manihiki. In the canoes were enough
cocoa-nuts to feed them for days if need be, and two large calabashes
of water.

The swift night fell, but the wind held strong, and one man sat at
the tiller while two others baled out the water that leaked into the
canoes. They kept a keen watch, expecting to sight Manihiki; but when
the dawn flashed out of the sky in the East, where the island should
have been, there was neither Manihiki nor any other land at all. They
had no chart nor compass; north and south and east and west stretched
the wastes of the Pacific for hundreds of leagues. Only here and there
in the ocean, and all unseen to them, like little groups of mushrooms
on a limitless prairie, lay groups of islets.

They might, indeed, sail for a year without ever sighting any land;
and one storm-driven wave of the great ocean could smite their little
egg-shell craft to the bottom of the sea.

They gathered together in the hut and with anxious faces talked of
what they might do. They knew that far off to the southwest lay the
islands of Samoa, and Rarotonga. So they set the bows of their craft
southward. Morning grew to blazing noon and fell to evening and night,
and nothing did they see save the glittering sparkling waters of the
uncharted ocean, cut here and there by the cruel fin of a waiting
shark. It was Saturday when they started; and night fell seven times
while their wonderful hut-boat crept southward along the water, till