The next three days Frank spent in removing the most perishable part of his goods to the cave, and this he did none too soon, for the afternoon of the third day a dense black cloud suddenly arose in the northwest, accompanied with ominous rumblings of thunder and quivering flashes of lightning. There was no fresh water on the island, so far as he had been able to discover, and the patter of the big rain-drops on the broad leaves of the palms was not only a pleasant sound, but one that assured Frank that for a time, at least, he was not likely to die of thirst. This warning foretaste of what he might expect for the next three months, if he stayed so long on the island, admonished Frank to make himself as comfortable as possible in the cave, and from its snug shelter defy wind and wave. He had heard Dunham say that these sudden storms were diurnal in their nature, and frequently of great fury and destructiveness, so the following morning he moved all his belongings into the grotto, as he liked best to call the cave, and set up housekeeping in a manner that no hurricane, however severe, could interfere with. "Nobody can say I am in the way here," he said--for he had gotten into the habit of talking to himself--surveying, as he spoke, his rocky home, and smiling sadly. "I am neither a bother nor a burden to any one now. I'm alone on an uninhabited island, and may die here, for all I can tell to the contrary; but I don't know but what that is better than being nagged by Aunt Susan, or driven about on the ocean, with nothing but an old schooner between one and the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. It's just eighteen days since I landed on this island, and I was five days on the schooner--that makes twenty-three--and I'm alive yet. If I have to stay here a year, that will not be very long. I've provision enough to last that length of time, and it will give me an opportunity to grow and to think. I'll read all Captain Thorne's books, and there's a good many of them, including works on navigation, history and science. I'll fish and row when the weather is fine, and when it isn't I'll amuse myself in enlarging the grotto. I'll make a collection of all the plants and flowers I find on the land and all the shells and seaweeds I find in the sea, or that may drift on the shore. I've a whole island that I may honestly call my own, a box of candles, plenty of matches, four cans of oil, a lamp and a lantern, a good boat, and lots of other things besides; so I am pretty well off, after all, and ought not to grumble at the hard luck which has befallen me." And Frank _did_ try hard not to grumble; but, with the sea beating eternally around his rocky home, and no change anywhere, day after day, save in the scudding clouds and the waning of the old and the rising of the new moon, he grew very weary of his utter loneliness, and there came a time when he would have given his life to hear again a human voice and see again a human face. CHAPTER XIV.