We found too the purple passion-flower and gaudy cactus blossoms bursting out in showy splendor from thorn-armed, fleshy leaves, bright-feathered parrots and parroquets, a little humming-bird that bore a flashing jewel in his breast and made a misty halo round about him with his rapid wing, beating the air so fast that it seemed to the eye a faint sphere of cloud.
And so we wandered on side by side, talking of what we saw. I parted the thorny bushes for her path, lifted her over the rocks and logs, and hand in hand we crossed the grassy open where I had gathered seeds, now ripe again, and thus came finally home, as the sun stood in the zenith.
We found the old man sleeping peacefully in my hammock under the shed, with Bible in hand lying open on his breast. Duke lay on the ground below him, furtively opening an eye now and then, though without stirring when we came up. On the fire, now burned nearly out, slowly steamed and simmered the dinner stew, whose appetizing odors floating to us apprised us of the fact that we were very hungry, just as the cool shade told us we were very warm, and the inviting armchairs suggested that we were really tired.
When I arose shortly after dawn the next morning, it was with no small degree of satisfaction that I found the sun brightly shining, and every indication present of a continuance of the fair weather and gentle breezes which had now held continuously for ten days. Very anxious to know the condition of the breakwater, Mr. Millward and I, shortly after a hearty breakfast of fish freshly caught, started for a walk up the beach to the resting-place of the galleon. We found no apparent change in the condition of the larger breakwater,--the one across the mouth of the chasm,--but strangely enough the smaller one, across the exit passage, had so far silted up with sand as to form an almost complete obstruction to the flow of a current through the chasm at low water. Indeed, the sand had almost buried the branches we had cast in, and was risen so far as to be plainly visible just below the surface of the water. This was an altogether unexpected result, and it now looked very much as though the silting and filling was to take place from the exit backward to the mouth, instead of from the mouth as we had calculated. However, it mattered not to us how the capricious waves chose to do their work, if only it were done.