on the subject of which I
shall be happy to have your advice. These incidents are, so to speak,
supernatural--"

"Supernatural!" exclaimed the sailor, emitting a volume of smoke from
his mouth. "Can it be possible that our island is supernatural?"

"No, Pencroft, but mysterious, most certainly," replied the engineer;
"unless you can explain that which Spilett and I have until now failed
to understand."

"Speak away, captain," answered the sailor.

"Well, have you understood," then said the engineer, "how was it that
after falling into the sea, I was found a quarter of a mile into the
interior of the island, and that, without my having any consciousness
of my removal there?"

"Unless, being unconscious--" said Pencroft.

"That is not admissible," replied the engineer. "But to continue. Have
you understood how Top was able to discover your retreat five miles
from the cave in which I was lying?"

"The dog's instinct--" observed Herbert.

"Singular instinct!" returned the reporter; "since notwithstanding the
storm of rain and wind which was raging during that night, Top arrived
at the Chimneys, dry and without a speck of mud!"

"Let us continue," resumed the engineer. "Have you understood how our
dog was so strangely thrown up out of the waters of the lake, after
his struggle with the dugong?"

"No! I confess, not at all," replied Pencroft; "and the wound which
the dugong had in its side, a wound which seemed to have been made
with a sharp instrument; that can't be understood either."

"Let us continue again," said Harding. "Have you understood, my
friends, how that bullet got into the body of the young peccary; how
that case happened to be so fortunately stranded, without there being
any trace of a wreck; how that bottle containing the document
presented itself so opportunely, during our first sea-excursion; how
our canoe, having broken its moorings, floated down the current of the
Mercy and rejoined us precisely at the very moment we needed it; how
after the ape invasion the ladder was so obligingly thrown down from
Granite House; and lastly, how the document, which Ayrton asserts was
never written by him, fell into our hands?"

As Cyrus Harding thus enumerated, without forgetting one, the singular
incidents which had occurred in the island, Herbert, Neb, and Pencraft
stared at each other, not knowing what to reply, for this succession
of incidents, grouped thus for the first time, could not but excite
the