dead. But I doubts it. Them sort o'
beasts, mates, is full o' bad habits, and I shouldn't a bit wonder if
this here critter crawls right away into the woods and lay hisself
neatly together to make a fit, and then waits till it all grows together
again, like graftin'."

"Think so, mate?" said Wriggs.

"Ay, that I do. Nat'ral hist'ry's the rummiest thing as I knows on, and
that there young Mr Lane, as is a nat'ralist by purfession, knows a
wonderful lot about it. Talk about conjuring; why, that's nowhere. I
see him one day take a drop out of a bucket o' water on a slip o' glass
and sets it on the cabin table."

"Why, you don't live in the cabin," growled one of the men.

"Yes, I do, mate, when he asts me to carry him in a bucket o' water, so
now then! Well, matey, he goes then to a little m'ogany box and he
takes out a tool like a young spy-glass, and sets the slip under it, and
shoves his eye to one end and screws it about a bit, and then he says,
says he, `Now then Smith, would you like a peep into another world?'
`Yes, sir,' I says, `I should.' `Then just clap yer hye here,' he says,
and I did, and there you could see right into a big sea, with a whacking
great brute lying in the bottom, like a sugar hogshead, with a lot o'
borcome structures got their heads in, and their long tails all waving
about outside. He said it was a fusorior or something o' that kind, and
all in that drop o' water, as looked as clear as cryschal when he took
it out o' the bucket. Ah, he can show you something, he can."

"I know," said Billy Wriggs, "it was a mykreescope."

"Dessay it was," said Smith. "It might ha' been anything. It's
wonderful what there is in nat're, my lads. Pity though as a man's
hands and legs and arms don't grow again, as some things does."

"Tchah! They don't," said Billy Wriggs.

"What? Why, they do, lots of 'em. Don't lobsters' claws grow again,
and lizards tails, and starfishes arms? What yer got to say to that?
Mr Lane tells me that there's some kinds o' worms as when you cuts
their heads off they grows again, and their tails too. There we are,
though--to-morrow morning."

The man was right, for day was breaking, and, after the manner of the
tropics, where there is scarcely any dawn, the sun soon rose to light up
the desolation around the ship, where the earthquake wave had swept
along, piling up sand and rock with heaps formed of torn-up trees, lying
near the pools of water which remaine