eriod which had now elapsed since she
could last have heard from or of us. As for Winter, he was a Portland
man, and the stories Bob told him of his kith and kin fully aroused his
semi-dormant longings to see them all once more.

The next morning, we all turned to with a will upon the schooner. It
happened that more materials were required from the wreck; and the
obtaining of these, and the rafting of them down to the ship-yard, had
hitherto been a work involving the expenditure of much time and great
labour, as, until the arrival of the two blacks in their canoe about six
months before, my father had nothing in the shape of a boat, excepting a
rude catamaran sort of an affair; and after the acquisition of the
canoe, though she was, of course, most useful for many purposes, the
rafting down of the timbers and planking was almost as tedious and
laborious an operation as ever, the canoe being too small and too light
for towing purposes, and their usual mode of procedure had been to kedge
down everything.

But our arrival put an entirely new phase upon this part of the
business. We got out our tube-boat, and put her together and rigged
her; and then we six men--four whites and the two natives, who were
strong, active lads--manned her and the cutter, and proceeded to the
wreck, where we combined our forces in taking apart such portions of the
wreck as we thought most suitable for our purpose.

By the middle of the afternoon two good-sized rafts were in the water,
and the _Lily_ taking one of these in tow, and the tube-boat (which Bob
insisted on christening as the _Ella_) the other, we got the whole down
to the bay and moored to the beach in little more than an hour--a task
which, my father declared, had usually occupied him and Winter the best
part of a day, and even then the amount of material transported had
scarcely been a quarter as great as that now brought down. So great,
indeed, had been the additional assistance afforded by the two pairs of
strong arms belonging to the cutter's crew, that we considered we now
had a sufficiency of material to plank the schooner right up to her
gunwale.

I do not know whether I have mentioned it before or not, but, in fitting
out the _Water Lily_, I had provided a very complete chest of
carpenter's tools, so that we might have the means of effecting any
necessary repairs to the cutter, as far as our skill would allow; and
these now came into play with excellent effect.

We