Now it happened that on the fifth day after the wreck of the Undine (for such was the vessel’s name) my father was taking his small boat round to Borwick, a little hamlet two miles south of Skaill Bay.  On passing the place where the vessel struck, now calm and peaceful after the storm, he shortened sail and rowed inshore.  A little distance up the face of the red cliff, above the high-water mark, and hidden by a projecting rock, there was a “scurro,” or fissure, which opened into a large cavern.  He had discovered this cavern when he was a boy, on some bird-nesting expedition; and now, scarcely knowing why he did so—­except, perhaps, for the passing thought that some of the wreckage had been washed into it by the high waves—­he climbed up from his boat and entered the cave.  To his astonishment he found there a half-starved man, who had been on board the Undine at the time of the disaster.  Having found the cave in his endeavours to scale the cliff, this unfortunate man had contrived to live there during the five long days and nights since the wreck by subsisting on shellfish, seaweed, and a few sea-birds’ eggs.

What surprised my father more than all, however, was that the man had as a companion a helpless little child.  Someone on the ship had placed the infant in an empty packing case, which had drifted into the cave.  The pilot conveyed the two waifs ashore and took them up to Crua Breck.

The man thus rescued by my father was Carver Kinlay; the little child was Thora.

All that I could learn from my uncle and old Colin concerning Carver, further than this, was that he was a native of the north of Scotland, and that he and his family were passengers on the Danish ship, which was to have put in at the haven of Wick, in Caithness.  Careless where he settled down, however, when cast upon the shores of Pomona, he had taken root here, like a weed in a flower garden.  He seemed to have had a store of money in the big chest which he claimed from among the wreckage, and circumstances enabled him to purchase the little farm of Crua Breck, together with a fishing boat.  The fishing, and a previous knowledge of the Orkney channels, had given him some experience of local navigation; and it was upon the strength of this experience that, having built his pilot boat, he intended to start in opposition to my father.

The greater part of what Mansie and Colin said, as they sat in the comfortable kitchen of Lyndardy, was entirely new to me.  I felt a strange pleasure in hearing now, for the first time, that Thora Kinlay owed her life, in some sort, to my own father.  When he carried the little girl up to the farm, with a seaman’s jacket covering her from the cold—­for the women and children had all been in their beds when the ship struck—­she was at once claimed by Mrs. Kinlay.  They named her Thora, after Mrs. Quendale, who had shown some kindness to her during the voyage, by reason of a resemblance that existed between the two children—­Mrs. Quendale’s own child and the child of Mrs. Kinlay—­both of whom were of a like age.