Of our blind wanderings in that gruesome land of swamps and sand, which, when we at last escaped from it, we learned was Florida, I must not write here.  It was months before such of us as were left crawled through into civilisation, and it is not too much to say that every day of the time after we parted from the wreck we carried our lives in our hands.  It was sixteen months almost to a day before I set foot once more on Peter Port quay.  For beggars cannot be choosers, and for the very clothes we stood in we were indebted to the kind hearts who took pity on us in the American States.  We had had to wait at every point till means of forwarding us could be found, and we were welcomed in Peter Port as men returned from the dead.  Within two hours I was scrambling up through the ferns and gorse above Port a la Jument to the welcome that awaited me at home.

I peeped through the window before going in, and saw the table laid for supper and my mother busy at the hearth.  She turned when I entered, supposing it was my grandfather and Krok, and then with a cry she was on my neck.

Ah, how good it was to feel her there, and to find her unbroken by all the terrible waiting!  She had hoped and hoped, and refused to give up hoping long after the others had done so.  She told me, between smiles and tears, that each time I went she had felt that she had probably seen me for the last time.  “But,” she said quietly, “I left you in the good God’s hands, and I believed that however it was with you it would be well.”

Then my grandfather and Krok came in, and my grandfather said very fervently, “Now God be praised!” and wrung my right hand as if he could never wring it enough, while Krok wrung the other, with eyes that stood out of his head like marbles and yet were full of tears.

During supper I told them shortly what had befallen us, and I had so much to tell, and they so much to hear, that we none of us supped over well, yet none of us had probably ever enjoyed a supper like it.

Then in turn I was hungry for news, and began asking about this one and that, intending so to come presently to Carette without baring my heart.  But my dear mother, guessing perhaps what was in me, gave me full measure.

“Jeanne Falla has a party to-night, my boy, and Carette is stopping with her.  You should go down and give them a surprise.”

“I will go,” I said, and jumped up at once to see if, among the things I had left behind when I went away, I could find enough to rig myself out suitably to the occasion.

My mother had a new blue guernsey just finished for me, a wonderful guernsey, when you think of it.  She had, I think, gone on working at it, after the others had given me up, just to show her trust in Providence, and her dear eyes shone when she saw me in it.  Loans from my grandfather, whose full stature I had now attained, and whose contribution was of importance, and from Krok, who would have given me one of his eyes if I had needed it, filled all my requirements, and I set off for Beaumanoir about nine o’clock as glad a man as any in Sercq that night.