Very gently, to avoid disturbing my father--I can see his face on the flimsy cot pillow now, looking sadly fragile and worn--I crept out from our tent in time to see the upper edge of the sun's disc (like a golden dagger of the Moorish shape) flash out its assurance across the sea, and gild with sudden bravery the trucks and spars and frayed rigging of the barque _Livorno_. Life has no other reassurance to offer which is quite so emphatic as that of the new risen sun; and it is youth, rather than culture, which yields the finest appreciation of this. In its glad light I ran and laughed, half naked, where a few hours earlier, in the murk of coming night, the sense of my own helpless insignificance in all that solitude had descended upon me in the shape of physical fear. Sea and sand laughed with me now, where before they had smitten me with lonely foreboding, almost with terror. I had my first bathe from a Pacific beach that morning; and, given just a shade more of venturesomeness in the outsetting, it had been like to be my last. In Livorno Bay the breakers were big, and the back-wash of their surf very insistent. The fire of his enthusiasm was once more alight in my father when I got back to our camp that morning; and one might have supposed it nourished him, if one had judged from the cursory manner in which his share of our simple breakfast was dispatched. Then, carrying with him a tomahawk, I remember, he led us down across the sand to where the ship lay, so deeply bedded that one stepped over her rail as it might have been the coaming of a hatch. Her deck, and indeed every uncovered part of the _Livorno_, was encrusted in the droppings of multitudinous sea-fowl. For almost as many years as I had lived, probably, these creatures had made a home of the derelict. To be sure, they had as good a right to it as we had; yet I remember how keenly we resented their claims, in the broad light of day; even as they, on the previous evening, had resented us. Ted promised them a warm time of it, and congratulated himself on having brought his old gun. 'I'll show 'em whose ship it is,' he said, 'to-night.' And the boy in me rose in sympathetic response. I suppose I looked forward to the prospect of those birds being given a taste of the fear they had helped to inspire in me.