Impatient to learn all, Mark ran ashore, for by this time it was broad daylight, and hastened into the crater, with an intention to ascend at once to the Summit.  As he passed along, he could detect no change whatever on the surface of the Reef; everything lying just as it had been left, and the pigs and poultry were at their usual business of providing for their own wants.  Ashes, however, were strewn over the rocks to a depth that left his footprints as distinct as they could have been made in a light snow.  Within the crater the same appearances were observed, fully an inch of ashes covering its verdant pastures and the whole garden.  This gave Mark very little concern, for he knew that the first rain would wash this drab-looking mantle into the earth, where it would answer all the purposes of a rich dressing of manure.

On reaching the Summit, our young man was enabled to form a better opinion of the vast changes which had been wrought around him, by this sudden elevation of the earth’s crust.  Everywhere sea seemed to be converted into land, or, at least, into rock.  All the white water had disappeared, and in its place arose islands of rock, or mud, or sand.  A good deal of the last was to be seen, and some quite near the Reef, as we shall still continue to call the island of the crater.  Island, however, it could now hardly be termed.  It is true that ribands of water approached it on all sides, resembling creeks, and rivers and small sounds; but, as Mark stood there on the Summit, it seemed to him that it was now possible to walk for leagues, in every direction, commencing at the crater and following the lines of reefs, and rocks, and sands, that had been laid bare by the late upheaving.  The extent of this change gave him confidence in its permanency, and the young man had hopes that what had thus been produced by the Providence of God would be permitted to remain, to answer his own benevolent purposes.  It certainly made an immense difference in his own situation.  The boat could still be used, but it was now possible for him to ramble for hours, if not for days, along the necks, and banks, and hummocks, and swales that had been formed, and that with a dry foot.  His limits were so much enlarged as to offer something like a new world to his enterprise and curiosity.

The crater, nevertheless, was apparently about the centre of this new creation.  To the south, it is true, the eye could not penetrate more than two or three leagues.  A vast, dun-looking cloud, still covered the sea in that direction, veiling its surface far and wide, and mingling with the vapours of the upper atmosphere.  Somewhere within this cloud, how far or how near from him he knew not, Mark made no doubt a new outlet to the pent forces of the inner earth was to be found, forming another and an active crater for the exit of the fires beneath.  Geology was a science that had not made its present progress in the day of Mark Woolston, but his education had