sible. To have paddled against the gale would have only
exhausted our strength to no purpose. As Malcolm found that he could
guide the canoe without me, he told me to bail out the water. As I
turned round to do so, I shouted with joy, for I thought I saw a large
boat under full sail coming down towards us. On it came, much faster
than we were driving; but as it drew near, it looked less and less like
a boat, till to my bitter disappointment I discovered that it was a
large haystack which had been floated bodily away. At length just
before us appeared a clump of trees, and we, hoped that the ground on
which they stood might be out of water. Malcolm steered towards the
spot. We might remain there till the storm was over. The trees bent
with the wind, and it appeared as if they could not possibly stand. We
approached the spot perhaps with less caution than we had before
employed. Suddenly the canoe spun round, a large rent appeared in her
bows, over she went, and we were thrown struggling into the water.
Before we could regain the canoe she had floated far away, and not
without a severe struggle did we succeed in reaching the land. We
climbed up by some bushes, and found ourselves on the summit of a little
knoll rising out of the water, and not comprising more than fifty square
yards. Our first impulse was to look out to see what had become of our
canoe, and we stood watching it with a bewildered gaze as it floated
away half filled with water. It was not till it had disappeared in the
distance that we remembered it had contained all our provisions. That
was bad enough, but we had never experienced hunger, and did not know
how long we might exist without food. What appeared then worse was,
that the waters were rising round our island, and we might soon have no
dry spot on which to rest our feet. We might climb up into the trees,
but we had seen other trees washed away, and such might be the fate of
these our last refuge. The day wore on, the storm ceased, and the
weather again became calm and beautiful. I now grew excessively hungry,
and cried very much, and felt more wretched than I had ever done before.
Malcolm, who bore up wonderfully, tried to comfort me, and suggested
that we should hunt about foe roots or underground nuts such as we had
seen the Indians eat. We fortunately had our pocket knives, and with
these we dug in all directions, till we came upon some roots which
looked tempting, but then we re