"Oh, then, of course it can't!" laughed Perce. "And the wind wont change, and carry the kelp all off, and land it on some other beach, as it did the last time I was coming to get sea-weed here. The wind clipped around to the nor'ard and northeast, and in the morning this beach, that had been covered with it, was as clean as a whistle; while Coombs's Cove, where there hadn't been any, was full of it." "Who's going to wake Nicodemus in the morning?" asked Moke. "The one who's first awake himself," said Perce. And he sang, the others joining in: "'Wake me up,' was his charge, 'at the first break of day, Wake me up for the great jubilee!'" After that they became silent. The fire died on the beach. The breakers plunged and drew back, with incessant noise, in the darkness; the wind moaned in the woods, and whistled among the coarse sparse grass and wild peas that grew about the dunes. But notwithstanding the strangeness of their situation, the boys were soon asleep. Uncle Moses proved a true prophet. There was no rain in the huddling clouds that at one time overspread the sky. They broke and lifted, and bright stars peeped from under their heavy lids. Then the moon rose and silvered them, and shed a strange light upon the limitless, unresting, solitary waves. CHAPTER VII. ADRIFT IN A DORY. For a long time Olly could see the boys by the light of their camp-fire, excepting when the tops of the rolling billows hid them from view. Although too far off at any time to recognize his friends, he made out snatches of the song then in vogue in his neighborhood; and he believed the camping party to be Frog-End boys who had come to the beach for kelp. Sometimes they passed between him and the fire; and finally they stood or crouched around it, as the wavering flames died down to a bright-red glow on the shore. To see them so near and so happy--it seemed to him that everybody was happy who was not paddling desperately in a frail skiff, against a relentless wind--to hear them singing and shouting, so wholly unconscious of him in his distress, was intolerable agony. "Oh, why can't they hear?" he exclaimed, in a voice to the last degree hoarse with calling for help. "Why couldn't they look this way once? Now it is too late!" He was by that time greatly exhausted; for when not signaling and calling, he had been making frantic efforts to paddle the dory against the wind. At first he had used the oar-handle, but he found it wholly ineffectual. Then he had torn up one of the thwarts, but it was too short and too clumsy for his purpose; and though for a time he seemed to make headway, the distance from the shore was steadily increasing.