The weeks passed in aimless wandering. For the children, the lapse of time acquired once more the texture of a dream: things ceased happening: every inch of the schooner was now as familiar to them as the _Clorinda_ had been, or Ferndale: they settled down quietly to grow, as they had done at Ferndale, and as they would have done, had there been time, on the _Clorinda_. And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realised who she was. There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon. She had been playing houses in a nook right in the bows, behind the windlass (on which she had hung a devil’s-claw as a door-knocker); and tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was _she_. She stopped dead, and began looking over all of her person which came within the range of eyes. She could not see much, except a fore-shortened view of the front of her frock, and her hands when she lifted them for inspection: but it was enough for her to form a rough idea of the little body she suddenly realised to be hers. She began to laugh, rather mockingly. ‘Well!’ she thought, in effect: ‘Fancy _you_, of all people, going and getting caught like this!--You can’t get out of it now, not for a very long time: you’ll have to go through with being a child, and growing up, and getting old, before you’ll be quit of this mad prank!’ Determined to avoid any interruption of this highly important occasion, she began to climb the ratlines, on her way to her favourite perch at the mast-head. Each time she moved an arm or a leg in this simple action, however, it struck her with fresh amusement to find them obeying her so readily. Memory told her, of course, that they had always done so before: but before, she had never realised how surprising this was. Once settled on her perch, she began examining the skin of her hands with the utmost care: for it was _hers_. She slipped a shoulder out of the top of her frock; and having peeped in to make sure she really was continuous under her clothes, she shrugged it up to touch her cheek. The contact of her face and the warm bare hollow of her shoulder gave her a comfortable thrill, as if it was the caress of some kind friend. But whether the feeling came to her through her cheek or her shoulder, which was the caresser and which the caressed, that no analysis could tell her. Once fully convinced of this astonishing fact, that she was now Emily Bas-Thornton (why she inserted the ‘now’ she did not know, for she certainly imagined no transmigrational nonsense of having been any one else before), she began seriously to reckon its implications.