During the Princess Charlotte Bay cyclone one of the survivors, after an absence of nearly twenty-four hours, came ashore. He explained that the boat of which he had been one of the crew was "drowned finish," and that the sea had taken him out towards the Barrier. He swam for a long time, and at last got tired and went to sleep, and for the best part of that frantic night he slept as he swam. Then the wind changed, and he came in with it, landing very little the worse. Others, on the same occasion, swam for fifteen and twenty hours; but "Dick" was the only one who went far out to sea, had a night's rest, landed fairly fresh, and seemed to accept the experience as a matter of course. Again, three boys and a gin--Charley, Belle Vue, Tom and Mary--were sailing out to a reef in a little dingy, when they sighted a turtle basking on the surface. Charley and Belle Vue jumped overboard and seized the turtle. It was a monster, and so strong that they called for help, and Tom plunged in to their assistance. Mary, frightened of being alone in the boat, also sprang overboard, taking her blanket with her, and the boat speedily sailed and drifted beyond reach. Charley and Belle Vue at once swam to a beacon marking a submerged reef about a mile away, but Tom and Mary, being caught in the current, were swept past the only available resting-place. They were 8 miles from shore. Tom soon began to flounder, but Mary, keeping her heart and her precious blanket, cheered him on, and, changing her course, took a "fair wind down," as she afterwards said, towards a distant point of the mainland. Lifting the giant despair from her boy's shoulders with encouraging words, holding him up occasionally when he got tired, and clinging all the time to the only piece of personal property she possessed, Mary eventually landed in a quiet bay. Tom was so exhausted that she had to drag him up on the sand, and having made him comfortable with her safe but sodden blanket, she hurried into town to report the circumstances to the police. A boat was sent to the rescue of Charley and Belle Vue, still clinging to the beacon, and the derelict dinghy was picked up. Nothing was lost but the turtle. SMOKE SIGNALS It is many years since a black boy at Port Darwin remarked casually to his master, a Government official there, "Steamer him come on; him sit down lame fella," and began to limp across the room. He said that the steamer was a long way away; but "blackfella he make 'em smoke; blackfella bin tell 'em." Four days after the steamer GUTHRIE slowly entered the port with her machinery badly disabled. THUNDER FACTORY A boy who had visited towns, listening intently to a reverberating peal of thunder asked--"How make 'em that row, Boss? He got big wheel?"