ld Lady Banana; and while your
screaming mouth is gagged, don't cut this small gig away, or else she
may navigate herself out to sea, as did your Ig's launch, and you be
left desolate again.

The tropical night was still; the lizards wheetled, the breakers roared
on the outer ledge, the ripples washed musically on the shelly shores,
the alligators flapped about on the surface of the lagoon, the insects
buzzed around the mangrove thickets; and as the gray dawn of morning
appeared, and the rain began to fall, a steaming hot mist arose, through
which the sea-birds flapped their wings and sailed away in search of
their morning's meal. The sharks and the deep-sea fish, however, lay
still and motionless low down by the base of the reefs, and watched with
their cold, round eyes. Captain Brand, too, arose, and, opening _his_
green-bluish eyes, smoothing his moulting feathers, and splashing his
fins in the wet sand, took an observation.

This was the rainy day for which Captain Brand had laid by all that
money to spend it in!

It was a Monday morning--Black Monday for Captain Brand--when, after
divesting his leg of the clove-hitch, he secured old Miguel's boat to a
large stone, and then, according to his own ancient practice, he
clambered with difficulty up to the venerable crag. Captain Brand had no
spy-glass, and there was a good deal of rain falling, but yet he thought
he saw a large ship, a brig, and a small schooner in the offing.

So Captain Brand scrambled down again, a good deal disconcerted, knowing
it would be hours and hours before those vessels got up to the island,
even were they so inclined; but, nevertheless, he bestirred himself.
Fortifying his inner man with the last half pint of aguardiente for
breakfast, which quite refreshed him, he went to work.

First, he took Miguel's copper coffee-pot, into which he emptied that
disciple of the net's shark-oil jug, which Miguel himself used for a
torch to attract the fish. Then, with a strip of old canvas--part of one
leg to Captain Brand's trowsers; to such straits was he reduced--seized
like a ball on the end of a stick, and a match-box, he was all ready for
Black Monday's work.

Captain Brand, however, made one serious omission; he snugly stowed away
his beautiful pistols in a locker of the boat to keep them dry, never
having been wet but twice before in all his marine excursions--the first
time at Cape Garotte, and the next when he jumped overboard from the
bri