the time was ripe and his imagination was now so extraordinarily vivid
that what he expected to hear he heard. The spirits assured him that
when the time came to go he would go. They did not tell him exactly when
he would go, but that could not be asked. No one must anticipate a
complete unveiling of the future. It was sufficient that intimations
came out of it now and then.

It was this feeling, amounting to a conviction, that bore him up on a
shield of steel. It soothed the natural impatience of his youth and
temperament. Why grieve over not going when he knew that he would go?
Yet, a long time passed and there was no sail upon the sea, though the
fact failed to shake his faith. Often he climbed his peak of observation
and studied the circling horizon through the glasses, only to find
nothing, but he was never discouraged. There was never any fall of the
spirits. No ship showed, but the ship that was coming might even then be
on the way. She had left some port, probably one in England, not
dreaming that it was a most important destiny and duty of hers to pick
up a lone lad cast away on an island in the Gulf or the Caribbean--at
least it was most important to him.

Now came a time of storms that seemed to him to portend a change in the
seasons. The island was swept by wind and rain, but he liked to be
lashed by both. He even went out in the dinghy in storms, though he kept
inside the reefs, and fought with wave and undertow and swell, until,
pleasantly exhausted, he retreated to the beach, drawing his little boat
after him, where he watched the sea, vainly struggling to reach the one
who had defied it. It was after such contests that he felt strongest of
the spirit, ready to challenge anything.

He plunged deeper and deeper into his studies, striving to understand