ith Nature, and drawn through lack of other
occupation into unusually intimate association with her, Gard found his
lonely rock a centre of strange and novel experience.

Situated as he was, even small things forced themselves largely upon his
observation and wrought themselves into his memory. He found it good to
lose himself for a time in these visible and tangible actualities,
rather than in useless efforts after an understanding of the mystery of
which he was the victim and centre.

He had given over much time to pondering the subject of Tom Hamon's
death, but had come no nearer any reasonable solution of it. That
hideous doubt as to himself in the matter recurred at times, but he
always hastened to dissipate it by some other interest more practical
and palpable, lest it should bring him to ultimate belief in its
possibility, and so to madness.

And so he spent hours watching that wonderful roaring cauldron on the
south stack where his water pools were. Other hours in study of the
social and domestic economies of gulls and cormorants. He saw families
of awkward little fawn-coloured squawkers force their way out of their
shells under his very eves, while indignant mothers told him what they
thought of him from a safe distance.

He bathed regularly in the heat of the day, but always after careful
inspection of his chosen pool, and one day fled in haste up the black
rocks at sight of the tip of a long, quivering, flesh-coloured tentacle
coming curling round a rock in the close neighbourhood of the pool in
which he was basking.

That monster under the rock gave him many a bad dream. It seemed to him
the incarnation of evil, and those horrible, bulging, merciless eyes
stuck like burrs in his memory.

One day, when he had been watching the cauldron, and filling his tin
dipper at the freshwater pools, as he came to descend the black wall
leading to the valley of rocks, he witnessed a little tragedy.

Down below, on the edge of the pool where the octopus dwelt, a silly
young cormorant was standing gazing into the water, so fascinated with
something it saw there that it forgot even to jerk its head in search of
understanding.

Gard stood and watched. He saw a tiny pale worm-like thing come creeping
up the black rock on which the cormorant squatted. The cormorant saw it
too, and he was hungry, as all cormorants always are, even after a full
meal. So presently he made a jab at it with his curved beak, and in a
moment