The loss of the cutter was one of their bitterest sources of regret during their life on this place, for now and then they could see the looming of land not more than twenty miles away toward the southward. They could easily have reached it in a day’s time, if the boat had been sound and whole. As it was, she would never float again, so they dragged her down the beach and patched her with grass and mud, and used her for a roof to cover them at night, for they found that the dews were heavy at some seasons of the year. It took them over a fortnight to move the boat from where she had been thrown to the place where they built their home, three miles away. It was heavy work hauling it across the sand, but, as I said, by the time that a month had gone, they were pretty comfortably settled, and were feeling quite at home in their quarters. In front of them was the long, narrow hook of white sand, over which the air danced and quivered when the hot sun beat down upon it. It curved out into the dark water for a mile, like a long, slender hook, cutting off the bay from the open water beyond. To the right of them was the bay shore of the island, the silvery sand strewn thickly with many-colored shells as far as the eye could reach. About three hundred yards away was the buried wreck. At that time nothing was to be seen of it but the ribs, that just showed above the sand like a row of dead, blackened stumps. From this wreck they obtained iron spikes, which Tom fashioned into rude tools and ruder fish-hooks. Such was the scene that they had before their eyes for all those sixteen months, unchanged, excepting as storm or calm would change the face of things; and the same monotonous sound was always in their ears—the eternal “swash! swash!” of the ground swell on the shell-strewn beach below the hut, sounding unceasingly through the deep, heavy thundering of the Atlantic breakers to the eastward. Day followed day in an unchanging round—now fishing and now hunting gull’s eggs. The fishing was done in the morning, when the tide was good. During the hot afternoons they would lie on the sand, in the shade of the cutter, looking out to sea, talking lazily, and now and then dozing. It was a helpless, listless life, and as time wore along, I doubt if they would have known what day or month or even what year it was, if Tom had not kept a score of the days as they passed, by marking them on the side of the cutter with his jack-knife—a short mark for week days and a long mark with a cross for Sundays. By this means they contrived to know how time was going with them.