I fell asleep at last, yet I awoke early; but not so early that the other inmates of the cottage were not up, and about their day’s work.  It was my wish to wait upon myself, and so diminish the cost of living with these secluded people; but I found it was not to be so; Tardif waited upon me assiduously, as well as his deaf mother.  The old woman would not suffer me to do any work in my own room, but put me quietly upon one side when I began to make my bed.  Fortunately I had plenty of sewing to employ myself in; for I had taken care not to waste my money by buying ready-made clothes.  The equinoctial gales came on again fiercely the day after I had reached Sark; and I stitched away from morning till night, trying to fix my thoughts upon my mechanical work.

When the first week was over, Tardif’s mother came to me at a time when her son was away out-of-doors, with a purse in her fingers, and by very plain signs made me understand that it was time I paid the first instalment of my debt to her for board and lodgings.  I was anxious about my money.  No agreement had been made between us as to what I was to pay.  I laid a sovereign down upon the table, and the old woman looked at it carefully, and with a pleased expression; but she put it in her purse, and walked away with it, giving me no change.  Not that I altogether expected any change; they provided me with every thing I needed, and waited upon me with very careful service; yet now I could calculate exactly how long I should be safe in this refuge, and the calculation gave me great uneasiness.  In a few months I should find myself still in need of refuge, but without the means of paying for it.  What would become of me then?

Very slowly the winter wore on.  How shall I describe the peaceful monotony, the dull, lonely safety of those dark days and long nights?  I had been violently tossed from a life of extreme trouble and peril into a profound, unbroken, sleepy security.  At first the sudden change stupefied me; but after a while there came over me an uneasy restlessness, a longing to get away from the silence and solitude, even if it were into insecurity and danger.  I began to wonder how the world beyond the little island was going on.  No news reached us from without.  Sometimes for weeks together it was impossible for an open boat to cross over to Guernsey; even when a cutter accomplished its voyage out and in, no letters could arrive for me.  The season was so far advanced when I went to Sark, that those visitors who had been spending a portion of the summer there had already taken their departure, leaving the islanders to themselves.  They were sufficient for themselves; they and their own affairs formed the world.  Tardif would bring home almost daily little scraps of news about the other families scattered about Sark; but of the greater affairs of life in other countries he could tell me nothing.

Yet why should I call these greater affairs?  Each to himself is the centre of the world.  It was a more important thing to me that I was safe, than that the freedom of England itself should be secure.