peering curiously at them, as if they wondered what new kind of creatures were these, without wings or beaks.  And you must see in the very first boat little May Warner, three years and a half old, with her sunny hair all wet with spray, and her blue eyes wide open to see all the wonders about her.  For May doesn’t know what danger is:  even while on the wreck, she clapped her little hands in delight to see the great curling crests of the waves; and now she is singing her merry songs to the sea-birds, and laughing in their funny faces, and fairly shouting with joy, as, at landing, she rides to the shore perched high on the shoulder of sailor Jack, while he wades knee-deep through the water.

So we have come to a second settlement of Coraltown:  first the polyps; then the men, women, and children.  Do you see how the good Father teaches all his creatures to help each other?  Here the tiny polyps have built an island for people who are so much larger and stronger than themselves, and the seeming destruction of their upper walls was only a better preparation for the reception of these distinguished visitors.  The birds, too, are helping them to food, for every little cave and shelf in the rock is full of eggs.  And now should you like to see how little May Warner helps them in even a better way?

Did you ever fall asleep on the floor, and, waking, find yourself aching and stiff because it was so hard?  Then you know, in part, what hard beds rocks make.  And in a hot, sunny day, haven’t you often been glad to keep under the trees, or even to stay in the house for shade?  Then you can understand a little how hot it must have been on Roncador Island, where there were no trees nor houses.  And haven’t you sometimes, when you were very hot and tired and hungry, and had, perhaps, also been kept waiting a long hour for somebody who didn’t come,—­haven’t you felt a little cross and fretful and impatient, so that nothing seemed pleasant to you, and you seemed pleasant to nobody?  Now, shouldn’t you think there was great danger that these people on the island, in the hot sun, tired, hungry, and waiting, waiting, day and night, for some vessel to come and take them to their homes again, and not feeling at all sure that any such vessel would ever come,—­shouldn’t you think there was danger of their becoming cross and fretful and impatient?  And if one begins to say, “Oh, how tired I am, and how hard the rocks are, and how little dinner I have had, and how hot the sun is, and what shall we ever do waiting here so long, and how shall we ever get home again!” don’t you see that all would begin to be discouraged?  And sometimes on this island it did happen just so:  first one would be discouraged, and then another; and as soon as you begin to feel in this way, you know at once every thing grows even worse than it was before,—­the sun feels hotter, the rocks harder, the water tastes more disagreeably, and the crab’s claws less palatable.  But in the midst of all the trouble,