A coast-guard station at Bouley Bay and St. Catherine’s Head rendered the further occupancy of the old martello tower at Rozel Head unnecessary, and only a few rats and bats now resented Alaric Hobbs’ sequestration of the second story. He meditated a comparative memoir upon the “Tides of Fundy Bay, and the Channel Islands,” with a treatise upon “Contracted Ocean Surface Currents.” Astronomer, hydrographer, geologist, and all-round savant, his lank form was already familiar to the Channel Islanders. And, like the wind, he veered around “where he listed.” “Great Jupiter aid us!” cried the son of Minerva, “Venus is unpropitious to-night. All my trouble is vain.” For when the black storm broke upon the little channel islet, Alaric Hobbs saw no way of a comfortable return to the Royal Victoria at St. Heliers. “I might leave all here and claim old Fraser’s hospitality for a night. No one can get up to the second story,” mused Hobbes, who now regretted having ordered the fly to come for him only at day-break. “Here is a wild night of inky darkness. The star occults only at three A.M. This hurricane ruins all. And old man Fraser may not have returned from London.” So with a basket of luncheon, a roll of blankets, and a bottle of cocktails, the volunteer astronomer reluctantly sought the dryest corner of the second floor of the old tower for a night’s camp. A square trapdoor hole whence the moldering ladder had fallen away, was in the middle of the old barrack room floor over the four embrasured gun room below. “I’ll just draw up my ladder, have a pipe, and take a nap. It may clear off. If so the observation goes, and then the highest tide of the year, I can get the register in the morning.” He had brought down his light instrument from the battlemented parapet for safety, and now, pulling up his rope ladder, he coiled it on the floor. “I can drop down below if I wish to if the rain should drive me out of here,” he cried as he curled up like a sleeping coyote. Below him the heavy door of the tower swung on its massive hinges, banging and creaking mournfully when a swirling gust set it swinging. The man who had slept out on the Lolo trail and bivouacked alone in the canyon of the Colorado, laughed the howling storm to scorn. “Better than being out in a blizzard in the Bad Lands!” he gayly cried, as he dozed away, having finished a good meal and lowered the level of the “Lone Wolf” cocktails. From sheer frontier habit, he laid his heavy revolver near at hand, and his old-time hunting knife. “You see, you don’t know what emergencies may arise,” often sagely observed Alaric Hobbes. “Thrice is he armed that hath two six shooters and a knife!”