narrative.

Shortly before midnight, his companion was awakened by the smell of
smoke. He scrambled out of his blankets on the floor,--and cursed the
man who still slept in his chair beside the smoke-befogged lantern on
the end of a carpenter's bench. Flames were creeping along the wooden
partition separating the forge from the shop. Half a mile away three
hundred men were sleeping,--but half a mile is half a mile. Before the
watchmen could sound the alarm, after their first courageous efforts
to subdue the blaze, the building was a roaring mass of flames and a
gleeful wind had carried tongues of fire to the side of the vessel where
they licked shapeless black patterns at first and then swiftly turned
them to red.

Stark-eyed, shivering people stood far back among the trees throughout
the rest of the night and watched the work of months go up in flame and
smoke. Nothing could be done to save the ship. Hewn from the hardiest
trees in the forest, caulked and fortified to defy the most violent
assaults of water, she was like paper in the clutch of flames. In the
grey of early morn the stricken people slunk back to their cabins and
gave up hope. For not only was their ship destroyed but the priceless
tools and implements with which she had been built were gone as well. It
was the double catastrophe that took the life, the spirit, out of them.

And while the day was still breaking, the man who had slept at his post,
stole off into the forest and cut his throat from ear to ear.

But now, months afterward, another ship is on the ways. Indomitable,
undaunted, the builders rose above disaster and set to work again.
New tools were fashioned from steel and iron and wood,--saws, chisels,
sledges, planes and hammers--in fact, everything except the baffling
augurs. Resolute, unbeaten hands toiled anew, and this time the humble
craft was not to be given a luckless name.

Superstition was rife. All save Andrew Mott saw ill-omen in the name
"Doraine." Steadfastly he maintained that as the Doraine had brought
them safely to the island, guided by a divine Providence, a Doraine
could be trusted to take them as miraculously away. And as for changing
the name of his prattling ward, he fairly roared his objection; though
an uncommonly mild man for a sailor, he uttered such blasphemous things
to a group of well-meaning women that even Sheriff Soapy Shay was
aghast.

After the dreary period that followed the disaster, there came a sharp