of clearing the villanous darkness from off of
it, carrying it with me, black as ever, into my
grave.

It was out of the horror I felt at doing that,
and out of the yearning of my heart towards you,
Alfred, when I thought of it, that the notion
came to comfort me of writing the Message at
the top of the paper, and of committing it in the
bottle to the sea. Drowning men, they say,
catch at straws—and the straw of comfort I
caught at was the one chance in ten thousand,
that the Message might float till it was picked
up, and that it might reach you. My mind
might, or might not, have been failing me, by
this time—but it is true, either way, that I did
feel comforted when I had emptied one of the
two bottles left in the medicine-chest, had put
the paper inside, had tied the stopper carefully
over with the oilskin, and had laid the whole by
in my pocket, ready, when I felt my time coming,
to drop into the sea. I was rid of the secret, I
thought to myself; and, if it pleased God, I was
rid of it, Alfred, to you.

The day waned; and the sun set, all cloudless
and golden, in a dead calm. There was not
a ripple anywhere on the long oily heaving of
the sea. Before night came I strengthened
myself with a better meal than usual, as to food
—for where was the use of keeping meat and
biscuit when I had not water enough to last
along with them? When the stars came out
and the moon rose, I gathered the wood
together and lit the signal-fire, according to
custom, on the beach outside my cavern. I had
no hope from it but the fire was company to
me: the looking into it quieted my thoughts,
and the crackling of it was a relief in the silence.
I don't know why it was, but the breathless
stillness of that night had something awful in it,
and went near to frightening me.

The moon got high in the heavens, and the
light of her lay all in a flood on the sand before
me, on the rocks that jutted out from it, and
on the calm sea beyond. I was thinking of
Margaret—wondering if the moon was shining
on our little bay at Steepways, and if she was
looking at it too—when I saw a man's shadow
steal over the white of the sand. He was lurking
near me again! In a minute, he came into
view. The moonshine glinted on his blue
spectacles, and glimmered on his bald head. He
stooped as he passed by the rocks and looked
about for a loose stone: he found a large one,
and came straight with it on tiptoe, up to the
fire. I showed myself to him on a sudden, in
the red of the flame, with the pistol in my
hand. He dropped the stone, and shrank back,
at the sight of it. When he was close to the
sea, he stopped, and screamed out at me, "The
ship's coming! The ship's coming! The ship
shall never find you!" That notion of the
ship, and that other notion of killing me before
help came to us, seemed never to have left
him. When he turned, and went back by the
way he had come, he was still shouting out
those same words. For a quarter of an hour
or more, I heard him, till the silence swallowed
up his ravings, and led me back again to my
thoughts of home.

Those thoughts kept with me, till the moon
was on the wane. It was darker now, and stiller
than ever. I had not fed the signal-fire for half
an hour or more, and had roused myself up, at
the mouth of the cavern, to do it, when I saw
the dying gleams of moonshine over the sea on
either side of me change colour, and turn red.
Black shadows, as from low-flying clouds, swept
after each other over the deepening redness.
The air grew hot—a sound came nearer and
nearer, from above me and behind me, like the
rush of wind and the roar of water, both together,
and both far off. I ran out on to the sand,
and looked back. The inland was on fire!

On fire at the point of it opposite to me—on
fire in one great sheet of flame that stretched
right across the island, and bore down on me
steadily before the light westerly wind which
was blowing at the time. Only one hand could
have kindled that terrible flame—the hand of
the lost wretch who had left me, with the mad
threat on his lips and the murderous notion
of burning me out of my refuge, working in his
crazy brain. On his side of the island (where
the fire had begun), the dry grass and scrub grew
all round the little hollow in the earth which I
had left to him for his place of refuge. If he
had had a thousand lives to lose, he would
have lost that thousand already!

Having nothing to feed on but the dry scrub,
the flame swept forward with such a frightful
swiftness, that I had barely time, after mastering
my own scattered senses, to turn back into
the cavern to get my last drink of water and my
last mouthful of food, before I heard the fiery
scorch crackling over the thatched-roof which
my own hands had raised. I ran across the
beach to the spur of rock which jutted out into
the sea, and there crouched down on the farthest
edge I could reach to. There was nothing for
the fire to lay hold of between me aud the top
of the island-bank. I was far enough away to
be out of the lick of the flames, and low enough
down to get air under the sweep of the smoke.
You may well wonder why, with death by starvation
threatening me close at hand, I should have
schemed and struggled as I did, to save myself
from a quicker death by suffocation in the smoke.
I can only answer to that, that I wonder too—
but so it was.

The flames eat their way to the edge of the
bank, and lapped over it as if they longed to
lick me up. The heat scorched nearer than I
had thought, and the smoke poured lower and
thicker. I lay down sick and weak on the rock,
with my face close over the calm cool water.
When I ventured to lift myself up again, the
top of the island was of a ruby red, the smoke
rose slowly in little streams, and the air above
was quivering with the heat. While I looked
at it, I felt a kind of surging and singing in my
head, and a deadly faintness and coldness crept
all over me. I took the bottle that held the
Message from my pocket, and dropped it into
the sea—then crawled a little way back over