He had endured solitude enough in it;
the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was life begun over,
with none to make new debts to except nature and himself, and no
besetments but his own circumvented propensities. What humble, happy
masterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless sleep and leaped into the
surf as into the embrace of a new existence. Every hour of day brought
some unfretting task or hale pastime. With sheath-knife and sail-needle he
made of his mainsail a handsome tent, using the mainboom for his ridge-
pole, and finishing it just in time for the first night of rain--when,
nevertheless, he lost all his coffee!
He did not waste toil. He hoarded its opportunities as one might husband
salt on the mountains or water in the desert, and loitering in well
calculated idleness between thoughts many and things of sea and shore
innumerable, filled the intervals from labor to labor with gentle
entertainment. Skyward ponderings by night, canny discoveries under foot
by day, quickened his mind and sight to vast and to minute significancies,
until they declared an Author known to him hitherto only by tradition.
Every acre of the barren islet grew fertile in beauties and mysteries, and
a handful of sand at the door of his tent held him for hours guessing the
titanic battles that had ground the invincible quartz to that crystal meal
and fed it to the sea.
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