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“‘What island is this?’ he asked.

“‘Tresco.’

“‘Tresco!’ he exclaimed, in a quick, agitated whisper, as though he dreaded yet expected to hear the name. ‘We were wrecked, then, on the Golden Ball.’

“‘Wrecked?’ cried my father; but the man went on pursuing his own thoughts.

“‘I swam to an islet.’

“‘It would be Norwithel,’ said my father.

“‘Yes,’ said he, ‘it would be Norwithel.’ And my mother asked curiously–

“‘You know these islands?’ For his speech was leisurely and delicate, such as we heard neither from Scillonians nor from the sailors who visit St. Mary’s.

“‘Yes,’ he answered, his face breaking into a smile of unexpected softness, ‘I know these islands. From Rosevean to Ganilly, from Peninnis Head to Maiden Bower: I know them well.'”

* * * * *

At this point Mr. Wyeth broke off his story, and crossing to the window, opened it. “Listen!” he said. I heard as it were the sound of innumerable voices chattering and murmuring and whispering in some mysterious language, and at times the voices blended and the murmurs became a single moan.

“It is the tide making on the Golden Ball,” said Mr. Wyeth. “The reef stretches seawards from St. Helen’s island and half way across the Sound. You may see it at low tide, a ledge level as a paved causeway, and God help the ship that strikes on it!”

Even while he spoke, from these undertones of sound there swelled suddenly a great booming like a battery of cannon.

“It is the ledge cracking,” said Mr. Wyeth, “and it cracks in the calmest weather.” With that, he closed the window, and, lighting his pipe, resumed his story.

* * * * *

“It was on that reef that Mr. Robert Lovyes was wrecked. The ship, he told us, was the schooner Waking Dawn, bound from Cardiff to Africa, and she had run into the fog about half-past three, when they were a mile short of the Seven Stones. She bumped twice on the reef, and sank immediately, with, so far as he knew, all her crew.

“‘So now,’ Robert continued, tapping his belt, ‘since I have the means to pay, I will make bold to ask for a lodging, and for this night I will hang up here my dripping garments to Neptune.’

“‘Me tabula sacer
Votiva paries–‘

“I began in the pride of my schooling, for I had learned that verse of Horace but a week before.

“‘This, no doubt, is the Cornish tongue,’ he interrupted gravely, ‘and will you please to carry my boots outside?’

“What followed seemed to me then the strangest part of all this business, though, indeed, our sea-fogs come and go as often as not with a like abruptness. But the time of this fog’s dispersion shocked the mind as something pitiless and arbitrary. For had the air cleared an hour before, the Waking Dawn would not have struck. I opened the door, and it was as though a panel of brilliant white was of a sudden painted on the floor. Robert Lovyes sprang up from the settle, ran past me into the open, and stood on the bracken in his stockinged feet. A little patch of fog still smoked on the shining beach of Tean; a scarf of it was twisted about the granite bosses of St. Helen’s; and for the rest the moonlight sparkled upon the headlands and was spilled across miles of placid sea. There was a froth of water upon the Golden Ball, but no sign of the schooner sunk among its weeds.

“My father, however, and the two boatmen hurried down to the shore, while I was despatched with the news to Merchant’s Point. My mother asked Mr. Lovyes his name, that I might carry it with me. But he spoke in a dreamy voice, as though he had not heard her.