le, but
it was a loveliness which suggested treacherous menace; the deceptive
beauty of the panther or of the soft-gliding snake that charms its prey
to death.

Isolation here would sap my mental essence and atrophy my brain, unless
some device could be found by which I could side-focus and divert my
trend of thought. Even had the young girl's diary remained to me, I
might by it have kept myself reminded of life in those civilized spots
which I could hardly hope to revisit; and so I might die sane. A single
book would have helped. I had been credited with a sense of the
ludicrous so whimsical as to be almost irresponsible. If now I could
invoke that facetious quality to my salvation I might hope to be
regarded as a consistent humorist.

At length I saw that the tide was setting in, carrying my raft with it,
and realized that I was hungry. When I had once more under my feet the
feel of solid earth, the sun was hanging near the snow-capped crater of
the volcano. I left for to-morrow all problems of exploration, and
stripping to the skin, ran up and down the soft sand of the beach until
the blood was once more pulsing regularly through my naked body. Then on
hands and knees I pursued and devoured numbers of the unpalatable crabs
that scuttled to hiding under slimy tangles of sea weed. My throat was
hot and sticky with the parch of thirst, but as night fell the jungle
began to loom darkly, a forbidding hinterland, and no fresh water came
down to my beach.

The melting snow was a guarantee of springs and a man can endure three
days without drinking if he must. I stretched myself between two large
rocks just upward of the high-tide line, cursing stout Cortez and all
those perniciously active souls who insisted on discovering the Pacific
Ocean.

Sleep did not at once come to my relief. I saw the stars, close and
lustrous, parade across the night, and instead of planning while I lay
awake practical things for the morrow, as a good woodsman might have
done, I was thinking futilely of the psychological features of my
predicament. Possibly the doctor's prediction of insanity had lain
dormant in some brain cell from which it was now emerging to frighten
me. I feared less for the hunger of my body than for the impossibility
of feeding my mind. It occurred to me that keeping a record of my
emotions would at once serve to fight back atrophy and leave an
interesting record for those who might, but almost certainly would not,
come