ched before dark. Meanwhile, the little fire Ted had
lighted against a blackened tree-stump had grown into the sort of
fiery furnace that was associated in my mind with certain passages in
the Old Testament; and, suspended by a piece of fencing wire from a
cross stake on two forked sticks, our billy was boiling vigorously.

In all such bush-craft as this Ted was _facile princeps_, and he asked
no better employment. Jerry was turned out to graze, belled and
hobbled (for safety in a strange place), and just as actual darkness
closed in upon us--no moon was visible that night--we sat down at the
mouth of the tent to sup upon corned beef, bread and cheese and jam;
the latter in small tins with highly coloured paper wrappers.

By this time my sense of chill and depression had pretty well
evaporated. The details of our domesticity were most attractive to me.
But I am not sure that my father quite regained his spirits that
evening. We each had a canvas camp-stretcher of the collapsible sort.
In ten minutes Ted had made himself a hammock bed of two sacks, two
saplings, and four forked stakes, which for comfort was quite equal to
any camp cot I have yet seen. Sleep came quickly to me, at all events,
and whenever I woke during the night, as I did some three or four
times, there was booming in my ears that rude music which remained the
constant accompaniment of all our lives and doings in Livorno Bay: the
dull roar of Pacific breakers on the sand below us, varied by a long
sibilant intaking of breath, as it seemed, caused by the back-wash of
every wave's subsidence.

Very gently, to avoid disturbing my father--I can see his face on the
flimsy cot pillow now, looking sadly fragile and worn--I crept out
from our tent in time to see the upper edge of the sun's disc (like a
golden dagger of the Moorish shape) flash out its assurance across the
sea, and gild with sudden bravery the trucks and spars and frayed
rigging of the barque _Livorno_. Life has no other reassurance to
offer which is quite so emphatic as that of the new risen sun; and it
is youth, rather than culture, which yields the finest appreciation of
this. In its glad light I ran and laughed, half naked, where a few
hours earlier, in the murk of coming night, the sense of my own
helpless insignificance in all that solitude had descended upon me in
the shape of physical fear. Sea and sand laughed with me now, where
before they had smitten me with lonely foreboding, almost