Reunion.
During the first few weeks we were on the island, Bill and I built ourselves a comfortable hut, and planted a plot of ground with roots and seeds given to us by our host, several boxes of which, he said, had fortunately been washed on shore from the wreck. Great had been my astonishment to find who he was. I had been narrating my previous adventures. When I came to give him an account of Miss Kitty, I saw that he was deeply interested. He asked me question upon question. I told him of her belief that her father was still alive, and of her resolution not to marry till his return home.
“Then, dear boy, I pray more than ever that we may make our escape ere long, for I am her long missing father, Lieutenant Raglan. Misfortune has pursued me for many years, but I shall be recompensed by finding my child all you describe her.”
I had not expected to find her father so old a man, but I discovered that care and anxiety had whitened his hair and furrowed his cheeks, and that he was not nearly so advanced in years as he had at first appeared.
But I must be brief in my account of our stay on the island. I have not, indeed, many incidents to describe. We employed our time in fishing, searching for birds’ egg and turtle eggs, and trapping birds. We also found a raft, on which we hoped to be able to push off to any vessel which might at length approach the coast.
I did not forget Miss Kitty’s earnest wish that her father should be brought to a knowledge of the Truth. This encouraged me to speak to him. I then expressed my regret that we had no Bible, observing what comfort it would have afforded us, how impossible it is without it for man to know God’s laws, and, consequently, to obey them.
“But surely, my young friend, men lead very moral and good lives without reading the Bible.”
“They owe their knowledge of what is good and moral to the Bible alone, sir,” I answered. “They get it secondhand, it is true, just as they get their knowledge of God from the Bible, although they may never look into it. Without the Bible we should still be worshipping blocks of stone, or creeping things, or the sun and stars. Without it man would never have discovered what God is, or how He desires to be worshipped.”
And I then went on, as well as I was able, to speak of God’s love to man, which induced Him to form His plan of salvation so exactly suited to man’s wants.
“I am sure, sir,” I continued, “God, who formed this beautiful world and filled it with wonders, cannot have left us without a revelation of Himself, and nowhere else but in the Bible can we find that revelation.”