It was a strange place to be, up here. To find oneself surrounded by grass and flowers and trees, and all the kindliness of nature, to feel the breeze blow, to smoke one’s pipe, and to remember that one was in a place uninhabited and unknown. A place to which no messages were ever carried except by the wind or the sea-gulls.

In this solitude the beetle was as carefully painted and the flower as carefully tended as though all the peoples of the civilised world were standing by to criticise or approve.

Nowhere in the world, perhaps, so well as here, could you appreciate Nature’s splendid indifference to the great affairs of Man.

The old sailor was thinking nothing of this sort. His eyes were fixed on a small and almost imperceptible stain on the horizon to the sou’-sou’-west. It was no doubt another island almost hull-down on the horizon. Save for this blemish the whole wheel of the sea was empty and serene.

Emmeline had not followed them up to the rock. She had gone botanising where some bushes displayed great bunches of the crimson arita berries as if to show to the sun what Earth could do in the way of manufacturing poison. She plucked two great bunches of them, and with this treasure came to the base of the rock.

“Lave thim berries down!” cried Mr. Button, when she had attracted his attention. “Don’t put thim in your mouth; thim’s the never-wake-up berries.”

He came down off the rock, hand over fist, flung the poisonous things away, and looked into Emmeline’s small mouth, which at his command she opened wide. There was only a little pink tongue in it, however, curled up like a rose-leaf; no sign of berries or poison. So, giving her a little shake, just as a nursemaid would have done in like circumstances, he took Dick off the rock, and led the way back to the beach.

CHAPTER XIV

Echoes of Fairy-Land

“MR. BUTTON,” said Emmeline that night, as they sat on the sand near the tent he had improvised, “Mr. Button—cats go to sleep.”

They had been questioning him about the “never-wake-up” berries.

“Who said they didn’t?” asked Mr. Button.

“I mean,” said Emmeline, “they go to sleep and never wake up again. Ours did. It had stripes on it, and a white chest, and rings all down its tail. It went asleep in the garden, all stretched out, and showing its teeth; an’ I told Jane, and Dicky ran in an’ told uncle. I went to Mrs. Sims, the doctor’s wife, to tea; and when I came back I asked Jane where pussy was—and she said it was deadn’ berried, but I wasn’t to tell uncle.”

“I remember,” said Dick. “It was the day I went to the circus, and you told me not to tell daddy the cat was deadn’ berried. But I told Mrs. James’s man when he came to do the garden; and I asked him where cats went when they were deadn’ berried, and he said he guessed they went to hell—at least he hoped they did, for they were always scratchin’ up the flowers. Then he told me not to tell anyone he’d said that, for it was a swear word, and he oughtn’t to have said it. I asked him what he’d give me if I didn’t tell, an’ he gave me five cents. That was the day I bought the cocoa-nut.”