to eke out the store he had made. A hut he built himself; later he planted a garden, and, to pass the time, sowed seeds he discovered in his store. The wild-fowl he sought to tame.
A catamaran he constructed, and set forth on one occasion to cross the Pacific on a raft of logs! A merciful gale hurled him the next day on to the beach. Months passed, much as they have done for thousands shut up with themselves on desolate rocks of the ocean.
The "Two Greatest Books in the world," as he called them, helped him to preserve the reason, which sometimes seemed to be failing. Hour after hour he would read aloud dialogues and description, and live and converse with those whom genius and inspiration have rendered immortal. On margin and cover of each volume he wrote, with his one pencil, annotations and comments, that served to occupy his mind. With the indomitable resolution that had ever marked him, he refused to lie down and die, or to relinquish the priceless spiritual and intellectual powers that were left him.
Of the very irony of fate it seemed that he—who had decried so persistently the evils of individualism—should be taught, on that desert island, what complete isolation involves; that he who had devoted himself to social enterprise should be reduced to communing with the fancied and the dead—should realize how helpless the most gifted, cut off from his kind, deprived of the power of co-operation and communion with his fellows.
Again the stars, that had looked down on the ledge on which he had lain and first realized his desolation, returned. Almost a year, he knew, had elapsed.
A hurricane, that swept away his hut in the night, hurled a "dug-out" canoe, empty, on the shore. His blankets he converted into a sail. A store of fresh fowl
