CHAPTER XII.
HOW AUNT JEANNE GAVE A PARTY It was on my return from my fourth voyage--in the brig _Sarnia_--that things began to happen.
The voyage had been a disastrous one all through.

We had bad weather right across to the Indies, and had to patch up there as best we could.

It was when we were slowly making our way north that a hurricane, such as those seas know, caught us among the Bahamas and brought us to a sudden end.
The ship had been badly strained already on the voyage out, and the repairs had been none too well done.

Our masts went like carrots and we were rolling helplessly in the grip of the storm, pumping doggedly but without hope against seams that gaped like a sieve, when the Providence that rules even hurricanes flung us high on a sandy coast and left us there to help ourselves.
Of our blind wanderings in that gruesome land of swamps and sand, which, when we at last escaped from it, we learned was Florida, I must not write here.

It was months before such of us as were left crawled through into civilisation, and it is not too much to say that every day of the time after we parted from the wreck we carried our lives in our hands.