unt Jane turned upon him her round innocent eyes.

"Oh, no, Mr. Tubbs," she assured him, "I don't think a single one
of them was named Benjy!"

The laughter which followed this gave me time to get myself in hand
again.

"Crusoe it is and will be," I asserted. "Like Great-Grandmother
Harding, I don't approve of changeableness. It happens that a girl
I know at home has a dog named Benjy." Which happened fortunately
to be true, for otherwise I should have been obliged to invent it.
But the girl is a cat, and the dog a miserable little high-bred
something, all shivers and no hair. I should never have thought of
him in the same breath with Crusoe.

That evening Mr. Shaw addressed the gathering at the
camp-fire--which we made small and bright, and then sat well away
from because of the heat--and in a few words gave it as his opinion
that any further search in the cave under the point was useless.
(If he had known the strange confirmatory echo which this awoke in
my mind!) He proposed that the shore of the island to a reasonable
distance on either side of the bay-entrance should be surveyed,
with a view to discover whether some other cave did not exist which
would answer the description given by the dying Hopperdown as well
as that first explored.

Mr. Shaw's words were addressed to the ladies, the organizer and
financier, respectively, of the expedition, to the very deliberate
exclusion of Mr. Tubbs. But he might as well have made up his mind
to recognize the triumvirate. Enthroned on a camp-chair sat Aunt
Jane, like a little goddess of the Dollar Sign, and on one hand Mr.
Tubbs smiled blandly, and on the other Violet gloomed. You saw
that in secret council Mr. Shaw's announcement had been foreseen
and deliberated upon.

Mr. Tubbs, who understood very well the role of power behind the
throne, left it to Violet to reply. And Miss Browne, who carried
an invisible rostrum with her wherever she went, now alertly
mounted it.

"My friends," she began, "those dwelling on a plane where the
Material is all may fail to grasp the thought which I shall put
before you this evening. They may not understand that if a
different psychic atmosphere had existed on this island from the
first we should not now be gazing into a blank wall of Doubt. My
friends, this expedition was, so to speak, called from the Void by
Thought. Thought it was, as realized in steamships and other
ephemeral forms, which bore us thither over roll