ened to touch at Kirkwall for repairs, and
with the sailor who had been saved with him he set sail for
Denmark. My uncle Mansie said that this Mr. Quendale had promised
to my father and others that he would be back again in Pomona in a
few months, but since that time he had never been heard of.

Now it happened that on the fifth day after the wreck of the Undine
(for such was the vessel's name) my father was taking his small
boat round to Borwick, a little hamlet two miles south of Skaill
Bay. On passing the place where the vessel struck, now calm and
peaceful after the storm, he shortened sail and rowed inshore. A
little distance up the face of the red cliff, above the high-water
mark, and hidden by a projecting rock, there was a "scurro," or
fissure, which opened into a large cavern. He had discovered this
cavern when he was a boy, on some bird-nesting expedition; and now,
scarcely knowing why he did so--except, perhaps, for the passing
thought that some of the wreckage had been washed into it by the
high waves--he climbed up from his boat and entered the cave. To
his astonishment he found there a half-starved man, who had been on
board the Undine at the time of the disaster. Having found the cave
in his endeavours to scale the cliff, this unfortunate man had
contrived to live there during the five long days and nights since
the wreck by subsisting on shellfish, seaweed, and a few sea-birds'
eggs.

What surprised my father more than all, however, was that the man
had as a companion a helpless little child. Someone on the ship had
placed the infant in an empty packing case, which had drifted into
the cave. The pilot conveyed the two waifs ashore and took them up
to Crua Breck.

The man thus rescued by my father was Carver Kinlay; the little
child was Thora.

All that I could learn from my uncle and old Colin concerning
Carver, further than this, was that he was a native of the north of
Scotland, and that he and his family were passengers on the Danish
ship, which was to have put in at the haven of Wick, in Caithness.
Careless where he settled down, however, when cast upon the shores
of Pomona, he had taken root here, like a weed in a flower garden.
He seemed to have had a store of money in the big chest which he
claimed from among the wreckage, and circumstances enabled him to
purchase the little farm of Crua Breck, together with a fishing
boat. The fishing, and a previous knowledge of the Orkney channels,
had g