water, and, waving her little hands with a gesture of farewell, turned, and curving her back like a dolphin, leaped into the surging swell of the estuary bar and was lost in its foam.  It would have been madness for him to have attempted to follow in his boat, and he saw that she knew it.  He waited until her yellow crest appeared in the smoother water of the river, and then rowed back.  In his excitement and preoccupation he had quite forgotten his long exposure to the sun during his active exercise, and that he was poorly equipped for the cold sea-fog which the heat had brought in earlier, and which now was quietly obliterating sea and shore.  This made his progress slower and more difficult, and by the time he had reached the lighthouse he was chilled to the bone.

The next morning he woke with a dull headache and great weariness, and it was with considerable difficulty that he could attend to his duties.  At nightfall, feeling worse, he determined to transfer the care of the light to Jim, but was amazed to find that he had disappeared, and what was more ominous, a bottle of spirits which Pomfrey had taken from his locker the night before had disappeared too.  Like all Indians, Jim’s rudimentary knowledge of civilization included “fire-water;” he evidently had been tempted, had fallen, and was too ashamed or too drunk to face his master.  Pomfrey, however, managed to get the light in order and working, and then, he scarcely knew how, betook himself to bed in a state of high fever.  He turned from side to side racked by pain, with burning lips and pulses.  Strange fancies beset him; he had noticed when he lit his light that a strange sail was looming off the estuary—­a place where no sail had ever been seen or should be—­and was relieved that the lighting of the tower might show the reckless or ignorant mariner his real bearings for the “Gate.”  At times he had heard voices above the familiar song of the surf, and tried to rise from his bed, but could not.  Sometimes these voices were strange, outlandish, dissonant, in his own language, yet only partly intelligible; but through them always rang a single voice, musical, familiar, yet of a tongue not his own—­hers!  And then, out of his delirium—­for such it proved afterwards to be—­came a strange vision.  He thought that he had just lit the light when, from some strange and unaccountable reason, it suddenly became dim and defied all his efforts to revive it.  To add to his discomfiture, he could see quite plainly through the lantern a strange-looking vessel standing in from the sea.  She was so clearly out of her course for the Gate that he knew she had not seen the light, and his limbs trembled with shame and terror as he tried in vain to rekindle the dying light.  Yet to his surprise the strange ship kept steadily on, passing the dangerous reef of rocks, until she was actually in the waters of the bay.  But stranger than all, swimming beneath her bows was the golden head and laughing face of the Indian girl,