They never lacked friends or company, though truly the friendship was mostly on their side and provokingly lacking in mutuality. Rabbits and seals, especially baby-rabbits and baby-seals, were the chiefest objects of their young affections, and they were sorely disappointed at the small response their proffered friendship evoked. On crabs this could be enforced by capture and imprisonment, but they found them cold-blooded, impassive playfellows, of altogether too-retiring dispositions, and only to be stirred into display of their natural abilities by provocation. Sea-birds were just as bad in a different way, and fishes were altogether too elusive until you wanted to eat them, when a baited hook did the trick in a moment. That wonderful father of theirs, however, managed to capture a pair of baby-rabbits, whose mother he had unfortunately knocked on the head for dinner before he perceived the mischief he was doing. The babies were welcomed with shrieks of delight and were like to be killed with the expression of it. The youngsters spent hours flat on their stomachs watching them in their boarded enclosure alongside the house, and more hours foraging for them the sweetest and tenderest herbs the hollows could yield. And presently the captives became friends, and were so comfortable in their narrow estate that they had no desire for a wider, but galloped about after their owners wherever they went, and sat anxiously twisting their noses on the beach when the irrepressibles found it necessary to wallow and frolic in the water. At times, for a change, they lived aboard the 'Jane and Mary' for a week or two, but Mistress Avice always had a very reasonable fear of one or other or both of the children tumbling overboard, and so the greater part of their life was passed ashore, with the sand-house as headquarters and all the rest of the island as playground. That a life so circumscribed should never have grown monotonous tells its own pleasant story. But the youngsters had known no other life with which to compare it, and their elders, who had, found it fuller and sweeter in its pastoral simplicity than any the great world had ever offered them. Every moment of their day was occupied, if not with work, then with enjoyments. The elders had to provide for the youngsters, and these again for theirs; and when every single thing must be drawn from Nature or from an accommodating but distant wreck-pile, such provision takes time and forethought. When the day's work was completed they all bathed and rambled far and wide, and it was on one such ramble, when they had gone as far along towards the eastern end of the Island as small legs could carry, that the end came--as suddenly as had come the beginning.