ow, as I rose to my
feet, I saw, some distance further down the spit, and rising from among
low bushes, an isolated rock, pretty high, and peculiarly white in
colour. It occurred to me that this might be the white rock of which Ben
Gunn had spoken, and that some day or other a boat might be wanted, and I
should know where to look for one.

Then I skirted among the woods until I had regained the rear, or
shoreward side, of the stockade, and was soon warmly welcomed by the
faithful party.

I had soon told my story, and began to look about me. The log-house was
made of unsquared trunks of pine--roof, walls, and floor. The latter
stood in several places as much as a foot or a foot and a half above the
surface of the sand. There was a porch at the door, and under this porch
the little spring welled up into an artificial basin of a rather odd
kind--no other than a great ship's kettle of iron, with the bottom
knocked out, and sunk "to her bearings," as the captain said, among the
sand.

Little had been left beside the framework of the house; but in one corner
there was a stone slab laid down by way of hearth, and an old rusty iron
basket to contain the fire.

The slopes of the knoll and all the inside of the stockade had been
cleared of timber to build the house, and we could see by the stumps what
a fine and lofty grove had been destroyed. Most of the soil had been
washed away or buried in drift after the removal of the trees; only where
the streamlet ran down from the kettle a thick bed of moss and some ferns
and little creeping bushes were still green among the sand. Very close
around the stockade--too close for defence, they said--the wood still
flourished high and dense, all of fir on the land side, but towards the
sea with a large admixture of live-oaks.

The cold evening breeze, of which I have spoken, whistled through every
chink of the rude building, and sprinkled the floor with a continual rain
of fine sand. There was sand in our eyes, sand in our teeth, sand in our
suppers, sand dancing in the spring at the bottom of the kettle, for all
the world like porridge beginning to boil. Our chimney was a square hole
in the roof; it was but a little part of the smoke that found its way
out, and the rest eddied about the house, and kept us coughing and piping
the eye.

Add to this that Gray, the new man, had his face tied up in a bandage for
a cut he had got in breaking away from the mutineers; and that poor old
Tom R