th a roar and such an indescribably
ferocious demonstration that the girl fled in terror to the culinary
regions, where she found the cat breakfasting on a pat of butter. The
girl yelled, and flung first a saucepan, and after that the lid of a
teapot, at the thief. She failed, of course, in this effort to commit
murder, and the cat vanished.

Breakfast was brought, but, excepting in the captain's case, breakfast
was not eaten. What between questioning, and crying, and hysterical
laughing, and replying, and gasping, explaining, misunderstanding,
exclaiming, and choking, the other members of the party that breakfasted
that morning in the yellow cottage with the much-abused green door, did
little else than upset tea-cups and cream-pots, and sputter eggs about,
and otherwise make a mess of the once immaculate tablecloth.

"Oh, Aunt Martha!" exclaimed Ailie, in the midst of a short pause in the
storm, "I'm _so_ very, very, _very_ glad to be home!"

The child said this with intense fervour. No one but he who has been
long, long away from the home of his childhood, and had come back after
having despaired of ever seeing it again, can imagine with what deep
fervour she said it, and then burst into tears.

Aunt Jane at that moment was venturing to swallow her first mouthful of
tea, so she gulped and choked, and Aunt Martha spent the next five
minutes in violently beating the poor creature's back, as if she deemed
choking a serious offence which merited severe punishment. As for the
captain, that unfeeling monster went on grinning from ear to ear, and
eating a heavy breakfast, as if nothing had happened. But a close
observer might have noticed a curious process going on at the starboard
side of his weather-beaten nose.

In one of his many desperate encounters with whales, Captain Dunning had
had the end of a harpoon thrust accidentally into the prominent member
of his face just above the bridge. A permanent little hole was the
result, and on the morning of which we write, a drop of water got into
that hole continually, and when it rolled out--which it did about once
every two minutes--and fell into the captain's tea-cup, it was speedily
replaced by another drop, which trickled into the depths of that small
cavern on the starboard side of the captain's nose. We don't pretend to
account for that curious phenomenon. We merely record the fact.

While the breakfast party were yet in this April mood, a knock was heard
at