ds,
butterflies, insects--all hanging in the heart of the storm and
travelling with it under its protection.

Though the air was still as the air of a summer's day, from north,
south, east, and west, from every point of the compass, came the yell
of the hurricane.

There was something shocking in this.

In a storm one is so beaten about by the wind that one has no time to
think: one is half stupefied. But in the dead centre of a cyclone one
is in perfect peace. The trouble is all around, but it is not here. One
has time to examine the thing like a tiger in a cage, listen to its
voice and shudder at its ferocity.

The girl, holding the baby to her breast, sat up gasping. The baby had
come to no harm; it had cried at first when the thunder broke, but now
it seemed impassive, almost dazed. Dick stepped from under the tree and
looked at the prodigy in the air.

The cyclone had gathered on its way sea-birds and birds from the land;
there were gulls, electric white and black man-of-war birds,
butterflies, and they all seemed imprisoned under a great drifting dome
of glass. As they went, travelling like things without volition and in
a dream, with a hum and a roar the south-west quadrant of the cyclone
burst on the island, and the whole bitter business began over again.

It lasted for hours, then towards midnight the wind fell; and when the
sun rose next morning he came through a cloudless sky, without a trace
of apology for the destruction caused by his children the winds. He
showed trees uprooted and birds lying dead, three or four canes
remaining of what had once been a house, the lagoon the colour of a
pale sapphire, and a glass-green, foam-capped sea racing in thunder
against the reef.

CHAPTER XVII

THE STRICKEN WOODS

At first they thought they were ruined; then Dick, searching, found the
old saw under a tree, and the butcher's knife near it, as though the
knife and saw had been trying to escape in company and had failed.

Bit by bit they began to recover something of their scattered property.
The remains of the flannel had been taken by the cyclone and wrapped
round and round a slender cocoa-nut tree, till the trunk looked like a
gaily bandaged leg. The box of fish-hooks had been jammed into the
centre of a cooked breadfruit, both having been picked up by the
fingers of the wind and hurled against the same tree; and the stay-sail
of the Shenandoah was out on the reef, with a piece of coral carefully