roared without. Once again the surges leaped against the cabin,
but it was evident that the wind was abating with the tide.

When he awoke it was high noon, and the sun was shining brightly.
For some time he lay in a delicious languor, doubting if he was
alive or dead, but feeling through every nerve and fibre an
exquisite sense of peace--a rest he had not known since his
boyhood--a relief he scarcely knew from what. He felt that he was
smiling, and yet his pillow was wet with the tears that glittered
still on his lashes. The sand blocking up his doorway, he leaped
lightly from his window. A few clouds were still sailing slowly in
the heavens, the trailing plumes of a great benediction that lay on
sea and shore. He scarcely recognized the familiar landscape; a
new bar had been formed in the river, and a narrow causeway of sand
that crossed the lagoon and marshes to the river bank and the
upland trail seemed to bring him nearer to humanity again. He was
conscious of a fresh, childlike delight in all this, and when, a
moment later, he saw the old uprooted tree, now apparently forever
moored and imbedded in the sand beside his cabin, he ran to it with
a sense of joy.

Its trailing roots were festooned with clinging sea-weed and the
long, snaky, undulating stems of the sea-turnip; and fixed between
two crossing roots was a bamboo orange crate, almost intact. As he
walked toward it he heard a strange cry, unlike anything the barren
sands had borne before. Thinking it might be some strange sea bird
caught in the meshes of the sea-weed, he ran to the crate and
looked within. It was half filled with sea-moss and feathery
algae. The cry was repeated. He brushed aside the weeds with his
hands. It was not a wounded sea bird, but a living human child!