No news reached us from without.
Sometimes for weeks together it was impossible for an open boat to cross over to Guernsey; even when a cutter accomplished its voyage out and in, no letters could arrive for me.

The season was so far advanced when I went to Sark, that those visitors who had been spending a portion of the summer there had already taken their departure, leaving the islanders to themselves.

They were sufficient for themselves; they and their own affairs formed the world.

Tardif would bring home almost daily little scraps of news about the other families scattered about Sark; but of the greater affairs of life in other countries he could tell me nothing.
Yet why should I call these greater affairs?
Each to himself is the centre of the world.

It was a more important thing to me that I was safe, than that the freedom of England itself should be secure..