After all, we see then that Cradock was wonderfully lucky—at least, if it be luck to live—in having been left behind, that evening, on an uninhabited island. “Desolate” nobody could call it, for the gifts of life lay around in abundance, and he soon had proof that the feet of men, ay, of white men, trod it sometimes. Following the shore, a little further than the sailors had gone, he came on a pure narrow thread of crystal, a current of bright water dimpling and twinkling down the sand. Wena at once lay down and rolled, and wetted every bit of herself; and then began to lap the water wherein her own very active and industrious friends were drowning. That Wena was such a ladylike dog; she washed herself before drinking, and she never would wash in salt water. It made her hair so unbecoming. Cradock followed up that stream, and found quite a tidy little brook, when he got above the sand–ridge, full of fish, and fringed with trees, and edged with many a quaint bright bird, scissor–bills and avosets, demoiselles and flamingoes. Wena plunged in and went hunting blue–rats, and birds, and fishes, while her master stooped down, and drank, and thanked God for this discovery. A little way up the brook he found a rude shanty, a sort of wigwam, thatched with leaves and waterproof, backed by a low rock, but quite open in front and at both ends. Under the shelter were blocks of ebony, billets of bar–wood piled up to the roof, a dozen tusks of ivory, bales of dried bark, and piles of rough cylinders full of caoutchouc, and many other things which Cradock could not wait to examine. But he felt quite certain that this must be some traderʼs depôt for shipping: the only thing that surprised him was that the goods were left unprotected. For he knew that the West Africans are the biggest thieves in the world, while he did not understand the virtue of the hideous great Fetich, hanging there. It was made of a long dried codfish, with glass eyes, ground in the iris, and polished again in the pupil, and a glaring stripe of red over them, and the neck of a bottle fixed as for a tongue, and the body skewered open and painted bright blue, ribbed with white, like a skeleton, and the tail prolonged with two spinal columns, which rattled as it went round. The effect of the whole was greatly increased by the tattered cage of crinoline in which it was suspended, and which went creaking round, now and then, in the opposite direction. No nigger would dare to steal anything from such a noble idol. At least so thought the Yankee trader who knew a thing or two about them. He had left his things here in perfect faith, while he was travelling towards the Gaboon, to complete his cargo.