ettled on the house. Phoebe threw
her apron over her head, and rocked in her chair.

Dick himself looked very grave.

Ucatella would have tried to follow him; but Dick forbade her. "'Tis no
use," said he. "When it clears, we that be men will go for him."

"Pray Heaven you may find him alive!"

"I don't think but what we shall. There's nowhere he can fall down to
hurt himself, nor yet drown himself, but our dam; and he has not gone
that way. But"--

"But what?"

"If we do find him, we must take him back to Cape Town, before he does
himself, or some one, a mischief. Why, Phoebe, don't you see the man has
gone raving mad?"

CHAPTER XIX.

The electrified man rushed out into the storm, but he scarcely felt
it in his body; the effect on his mind overpowered hail-stones. The
lightning seemed to light up the past; the mighty explosions of thunder
seemed cannon strokes knocking down a wall, and letting in his whole
life.

Six hours the storm raged, and, before it ended, he had recovered nearly
his whole past, except his voyage with Captain Dodd--that, indeed, he
never recovered--and the things that happened to him in the hospital
before he met Phoebe Falcon and her brother: and as soon as he had
recovered his lost memory, his body began to shiver at the hail and
rain. He tried to find his way home, but missed it; not so much,
however, but that he recovered it as soon as it began to clear, and
just as they were coming out to look for him, he appeared before them,
dripping, shivering, very pale and worn, with the handkerchief still
about his head.

At sight of him, Dick slipped back to his sister, and said, rather
roughly, "There now, you may leave off crying: he is come home; and
to-morrow I take him to Cape Town."

Christopher crept in, a dismal, sinister figure.

"Oh, sir," said Phoebe, "was this a day for a Christian to be out in?
How could you go and frighten us so?"

"Forgive me, madam," said Christopher humbly; "I was not myself."

"The best thing you can do now is to go to bed, and let us send you up
something warm."

"You are very good," said Christopher, and retired with the air of one
too full of great amazing thoughts to gossip.

He slept thirty hours at a stretch, and then, awaking in the dead of
night, he saw the past even more clear and vivid; he lighted his candle
and began to grope in the Cape Gazette. As to dates, he now remembered
when he had sailed from England, and also from Madei