I went on like this for a while, growing gloomier and gloomier, when suddenly I thought of Polynesia.  “You’re always safe with the Doctor,” she had said.  “He gets there.  Remember that.”

I’m sure I wouldn’t have minded so much if he had been here with me.  It was this being all alone that made me want to weep.  And yet the petrel was alone!—­What a baby I was, I told myself, to be scared to the verge of tears just by loneliness!  I was quite safe where I was—­for the present anyhow.  John Dolittle wouldn’t get scared by a little thing like this.  He only got excited when he made a discovery, found a new bug or something.  And if what Polynesia had said was true, he couldn’t be drowned and things would come out all right in the end somehow.

I threw out my chest, buttoned up my collar and began walking up and down the short raft to keep warm.  I would be like John Dolittle.  I wouldn’t cry—­ And I wouldn’t get excited.

How long I paced back and forth I don’t know.  But it was a long time—­ for I had nothing else to do.

At last I got tired and lay down to rest.  And in spite of all my troubles, I soon fell fast asleep.

This time when I woke up, stars were staring down at me out of a cloudless sky.  The sea was still calm; and my strange craft was rocking gently under me on an easy swell.  All my fine courage left me as I gazed up into the big silent night and felt the pains of hunger and thirst set to work in my stomach harder than ever.

“Are you awake?” said a high silvery voice at my elbow.

I sprang up as though some one had stuck a pin in me.  And there, perched at the very end of my raft, her beautiful golden tail glowing dimly in the starlight, sat Miranda, the Purple Bird-of-Paradise!

Never have I been so glad to see any one in my life.  I almost f ell into the water as I leapt to hug her.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” said she.  “I guessed you must be tired after all you’ve been through—­Don’t squash the life out of me, boy:  I’m not a stuffed duck, you know.”

“Oh, Miranda, you dear old thing,” said I, “I’m so glad to see you.  Tell me, where is the Doctor?  Is he alive?”

“Of course he’s alive—­and it’s my firm belief he always will be.  He’s over there, about forty miles to the westward.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“He’s sitting on the other half of the Curlew shaving himself—­ or he was, when I left him.”

“Well, thank Heaven he’s alive!” said I—­“And Bumpo—­and the animals, are they all right?”

“Yes, they’re with him.  Your ship broke in half in the storm.  The Doctor had tied you down when he found you stunned.  And the part you were on got separated and floated away.  Golly, it was a storm!  One has to be a gull or an albatross to stand that sort of weather.  I had been watching for the Doctor for three weeks, from a cliff-top; but last night I had to take refuge