“It only needs perseverance to make it yield it. What a grand thing that perseverance is! I think, boys, we’ve learned a little of its virtue, even in this cruise of ours, though we haven’t done everything we had hoped. But perseverance builds names and fortunes—it builds cities too.”
“It builds continents,” said Rory, looking very wise—for him; “just look what a midge of a creature the coral zoophyte is, but look at the work it is doing every day, the worlds it is throwing up almost, for future millions to inhabit.”
Thus continued our heroes talking till long past midnight; and even after they had retired, one at least did not fall all at once asleep. That one was Allan. He began to believe that his dreams of restoring his dear old roof-tree, Arrandoon Castle, would yet be realised. That a time would soon come when his mother and sister would sit in halls as noble as any his forefathers had occupied, and mingle among a peasantry as happy and content as they were in the good old years of long, long ago. Perseverance would do it; and, happy thought, he would adopt a new badge, and it would neither be a flower, nor a fern, nor a feather, but simply a piece of coral. Then presently he found himself deep down in the green translucent waters of the Indian Ocean, in a cave, in a coral isle, conversing with a mermaid as freely as if it were the most natural thing in all the world; then he awoke, and behold it was broad daylight.
At least it was just as broad daylight as it was likely to be, while the good yacht was still enveloped in the bosom of that dense mist.
The Snowbird evidently did not think herself the best used yacht in the world. They would not give her sail enough to let her fly along as she wanted to, and, more than that, she was constantly being checked by the pieces of ice that struck and hammered at her on both bow and quarter. Sometimes she seemed to lose her temper and stop almost dead still, as much as to say, “I do think such treatment most ungrateful after all I’ve gone through, and, if it continues, I declare I won’t go another step of my toe towards home.”
Ah! but when a week passed away, and when all at once the yacht sailed out from this dark and pitiless mist, and found herself in a blue rippling sea, with a blue and cloudless sky overhead, and never a bit of ice to be seen, then she did regain her temper.
“Well,” she said, “this is nice, this is perfectly jolly; now for a trifle more sail, and won’t I go rolling home!”
Sunlight seemed to bring joy to every heart. Our heroes walked the deck arrayed in their best, walked erect with springy steps and smiling faces. They had laid aside their winter and donned their summer clothing, and summer was in their hearts as well.
But the Snowbird, the once beautiful Snowbird, now all scraped with ice and bare, should she have holiday attire likewise? She was not forgotten, I do assure you. For days and days men were slung in ropes overboard, on all sides of her, scraping, and painting, and polishing; men were hung like herrings aloft, scraping and varnishing there; and soon the decks were scrubbed to a snowy whiteness, and every bit of brass about her shone like burnished gold. She seemed a spick-and-span new Snowbird, and, what is more, she seemed to feel it too, and give herself all the additional airs and graces she could think of.
At long last the seagulls came sailing to meet her, and a day or two thereafter,—