An event was now pending over the castaway family which was destined to darken their bright sky, and interrupt them in the even tenor of their way.

 

Up to this time the interest, not to say delight, with which they went about their daily avocations, the fineness of the weather, and the romance of their situation, had prevented their minds from dwelling much on the flight of time, and if Pauline had not remembered the Sundays by conscientiously keeping a daily record with a pencil on a piece of bark, not one of them would have believed it possible that two months had elapsed since they were cast ashore.

 

The sanguine hope, too, which filled the breast of each, that a vessel would certainly pass by sooner or later and take them off, prevented their being disturbed by gloomy anticipations of a long exile, and it is probable that they would have gone on pleasantly for a much longer time, improving the golden cave, and exploring the reef, and developing the resources of what Otto styled the Queendom, without much caring about the future, had not the event above referred to come upon them with the sudden violence of a thunder-clap, terminating their peaceful life in a way they had never anticipated, and leading to changes which the wildest imagination could hardly have conceived.

 

That event was, indeed, the arrival of a ship, but it did not arrive in the manner that had been expected. It came in the dead of a dark night, when the elements seemed to have declared fierce war against each other, for it was difficult to say whether the roaring of the sea, the crashing of the thunder, or the flashing of the forked lightning was most tremendous.

 

A previous storm or two, of a mild type, having warned our trio that Paradise had not been quite regained, even in that lovely region, they had fitted something like a front, formed of wreckage, to the golden cave, and this had, up to that time, formed a sufficient protection against slight inclemencies of weather; but on this particular night the gusts of wind were so violent, and shook the front of their dwelling so much, that both Dominick and his brother found it impossible to sleep. Their sister, however, lay undisturbed, because she reposed in an inner chamber, which had been screened off with broken planks, and these not only checked draughts, but deadened sounds.

 

“I’m afraid our wall will come down,” said Dominick, raising himself at last on one elbow, and gazing at the wooden erection uneasily.

 

“Oh, let it come!” growled Otto, who had been so frequently checked while dropping into slumber that night that he was getting quite cross.

 

Not feeling quite so regardless of consequences, his brother Dominick arose and endeavoured to prop the weak part of the structure with an additional piece of timber.

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