hilosophy, and had enforced his recommendations with sundry apt
quotations from dead and living novelists, dramatists, and poets.
Minnie herself, poor girl, felt that she ought not to run counter to
the wishes of her best and dearest friends, so she too advised delay
for a "little time"; and Ruby was fain to content himself with
bewailing his hard lot internally, and knocking Jamie Dove's bellows,
anvils, and sledge-hammers about in a way that induced that son of
Vulcan to believe his assistant had gone mad!

As for big Swankie, he hid his ill-gotten gains under the floor of
his tumble-down cottage, and went about his evil courses as usual in
company with his comrade Davy Spink, who continued to fight and make
it up with him as of yore.

It must not be supposed that Ruby forgot the conversation he had
overheard in the Gaylet Cove. He and Minnie and his uncle had
frequent discussions in regard to it, but to little purpose; for
although Swankie and Spink had discovered old Mr. Brand's body on the
Bell Rock, it did not follow that any jewels or money they had found
there were necessarily his. Still Ruby could not divest his mind of
the feeling that there was some connexion between the two, and he was
convinced, from what had fallen from Davy Spink about "silver teapots
and things", that Swankie was the man of whose bad deeds he himself
had been suspected.

As there seemed no possibility of bringing the matter home to him,
however, he resolved to dismiss the whole affair from his mind in the
meantime.

Things were very much in this state when, in the spring, the
operations at the Bell Bock were resumed.

Jamie Dove, Ruby, Robert Selkirk, and several of the principal
workmen, accompanied the engineers on their first visit to the rock,
and they sailed towards the scene of their former labours with deep
and peculiar interest, such as one might feel on renewing
acquaintance with an old friend who had passed through many hard and
trying struggles since the last time of meeting.

The storms of winter had raged round the Bell Rock as usual--as they
had done, in fact, since the world began; but that winter the
handiwork of man had also been exposed to the fury of the elements
there. It was known that the beacon had survived the storms, for it
could be seen by telescope from the shore in clear weather--like a
little speck on the seaward horizon. Now they were about to revisit
the old haunt, and have a close inspection of the