The cutter had been lost in a stormy night on a coral reef in the southern seas; but a boat’s-load of the crew, among whom was the junior lieutenant, had managed to land on an uninhabited island, and make good a living there for four dreary months. “If I had only got Flora with me,” Harry wrote in the letter—in which he was at last able to announce his rescue, and in which he sought to make light of the hardships he and his companions had undergone—to his father and mother, “the old lass would have found plenty to do among the rabbits and a kind of partridge. She would have been invaluable, if her very value had not proved the ruin of her, and if she had not fallen a victim to her general gaminess, as other poor beggars were like to do; but that is all over now.” When the castaway men were at last taken off the island, it was by a foreign ship that carried them thousands of miles out of their track; but the sufferers had been treated with every attention and kindness by good Samaritans in the guise of Brazilian sailors, and by the time Harry’s letter should reach the parsonage, to disperse any little anxiety that might be entertained there, the writer would be far on his way home. Mrs. Bloomfield had enough spirit to undertake a journey to Portsmouth, in order to be the first of all the friends who accompanied her to greet her son. Her husband was not able to escort her; he waited placidly with Flora, satisfied to be taken to the railway station to meet the appointed train. I need not say that the old dog was an object of great interest, while she comported herself with her own exemplary sobriety. If she had an intuition that her master was on the road, she did not betray it on this occasion. She had no call to announce to the idle world of Rushbrook—and it was rather an idle holiday world, with a marked inclination to congregate at the railway station on another fine spring morning—that Master Harry was coming. Withal, Flora’s sagacity and devotion could hardly be expected to compass the fact that late events had intensified the importance of such information. She submitted to have a sailor’s blue ribbon tied round her neck, in honour of the day and her master; but she wore the decoration rather with imperturbability than with conscious pride, and she took no notice of the flags and evergreens which were displayed with kindly zeal. When the train steamed into the station, and a brown face appeared at the window of a carriage, crowded with brothers and sisters, in addition to an old mother, Flora did strain violently at the chain by which Hoppus, for greater precaution, held her, and it was with difficulty that she was induced to have the grace to permit Harry to pay his respects first to his father—who, as by an involuntary motion, uncovered his white head to receive his lost son—before she sprang upon her master in a rapture of welcome, which Harry’s “Hold on, old dog; don’t worry me outright!” only raised to a higher pitch of ecstasy.