The impetus seemed somehow to come from outside my own organism.  All my life I had been irresolute, the sport of circumstances, trifling with this and that, unable to set my face steadfastly toward any goal.  Yet never, since I have trodden this path, have I looked to right or left.  I have defied both human opinion and the obstacles which an unfriendly fate has thrown in my way.  All alone, I, a sailor hitherto of pleasure-craft among the bays and islands of the New England coast, put forth in my little sloop for a voyage of three hundred miles on the loneliest wastes of the Pacific.  All alone, did I say?  No, there was Benjy the faithful.  His head is at my knee as I write.  He knows, I think, that his master’s mood is sad to-night.  Oh, Helen, if you ever see these lines, will you realize how I have longed for you—­how it sometimes seems that my soul must tear itself loose from my body and speed to you across half a world?

February 1.  Since my last record my time has been well filled.  In the Island Queen I have been surveying the coasts of my domain, sailing as close in as I dared, and taking note of every crevice that might be the mouth of a cave.  Then, either in the rowboat or by scrambling down the cliffs, I visit the indicated point.  It is bitterly hard labor, but it has its compensations.  I am growing hale and strong, brown and muscular.  Aunt Sarah won’t offer me any more of her miserable decoctions when I go home.  Heading first toward the north, I am systematically making the rounds of the island, for, after all, how do I know for certain that Captain Sampson buried his treasure near the east anchorage?  For greater security he may have chosen the other side, where there is another bay, I should judge deeper and freer of rocks than this one, though more open to storms.

So far I have discovered half a dozen caves, most of them quite small.  Any one of them seemed such a likely place that at first I was quite hopeful.  But I have found nothing.  Usually, the floor of the cave beneath a few inches of sand is rock.  Only in the great cave under the point have I found sand to any depth.  The formation in some cases is little more than a hardened clay, but to excavate it would require long toil, probably blasting—­and I have no explosives.  And I go always on the principle that Captain Sampson and his two assistants had not time for any elaborate work of concealment.  Most likely they laid the chest in some natural niche.  Sailors are unskilled in the use of such implements as spades, and besides, the very heart of the undertaking was haste and secrecy.  They must have worked at night and between two tides, for few of the caves can be reached except at the ebb.  And I take it as certain that the cave must have opened directly on the sea.  For three men to transport such a weight and bulk by land would be sheer impossibility.

February 10.  To-day a strange, strange thing happened—­so strange, so wonderful and glorious that it ought to be recorded in luminous ink.  And I owe it all to Benjy!  Little dog, you shall go in a golden collar and eat lamb-chops every day!  This morning—­