without ceasing, penetrating through their miserable roof, and falling—­drop, drip, drop—­upon the sodden floor.  Augusta sat by herself in the smaller hut, doing what she could to amuse little Dick by telling him stories.  Nobody knows how hard she found it to have to invent stories when she was thus overwhelmed with misfortune; but it was the only way of keeping the poor child from crying, as the sense of cold and misery forced itself into his little heart.  So she told him about Robinson Crusoe, and then she told him that they were playing at being Robinson Crusoe, to which the child very sensibly replied that he did not at all like the game, and wanted his mamma.

And meanwhile it grew darker and colder and damper hour by hour, till at last the light went out, and left her with nothing to keep her company but the moaning wind, the falling rain, and the wild cries of the sea-birds when something disturbed them from their rest.  The child was asleep at last, wrapped up in a blanket and one of the smaller sails; and Augusta, feeling quite worn out with solitude and the pressure of heavy thoughts, began to think that the best thing she could do would be to try to follow his example, when suddenly there came a knock at the boards which served for a door to the shanty.

“Who is it?” she cried, with a start.

“Me—­Mr. Meeson,” answered a voice.  “Can I come in?”

“Yes; if you like,” said Augusta, sharply, though in her heart she was really glad to see him, or, rather, to hear him, for it was too dark to see anything.  It is wonderful how, under the pressure of a great calamity, we forget our quarrels and our spites, and are ready to jump at the prospect of the human companionship of our deadliest enemy.  And “the moral of that is,” as the White Queen says, that as we are all night and day face to face with the last dread calamity—­Death—­we should throughout our lives behave as though we saw the present shadow of his hand.  But that will never happen in the world while human nature is human nature—­and when will it become anything else?

“Put up the door again,” said Augusta, when, from a rather rawer rush of air than usual, she gathered that her visitor was within the hut.

Mr. Meeson obeyed, groaning audibly.  “Those two brutes are getting drunk,” he said, “swallowing down rum by the gallon.  I have come because I could not stop with them any longer—­and I am so ill, Miss Smithers, so ill!  I believe that I am going to die.  Sometimes I feel as though all the marrow in my bones were ice, and—­and—­at others just as though somebody were shoving a red-hot wire up them.  Can’t you do anything for me?”

“I don’t see what is to be done,” answered Augusta, gently, for the man’s misery touched her in spite of her dislike for him.  “You had better lie down and try to go to sleep.”

“To sleep!” he moaned; “how can I sleep?  My blanket is wringing wet and my clothes are damp,” and he fairly broke down and began to groan and sob.