[Illustration:-THE PUZZLING DOCUMENT-]

I puzzled over it for an hour, and then gave it up, not having obtained the slightest clue to the meaning, if any meaning it had.  Then I reflected that a man was not likely to go to the trouble of writing out a long list of articles, and sketching a skull with particular lines and figures radiating from it for nought, to say nothing of hiding the paper away in such a cosy little nook as the one in which I found it.  Thus reflecting I turned along the middle path homeward, wondering if some old privateer skipper, or even pirate, had long years ago hidden the articles mentioned in the list in some part of the island, or could it refer to some treasure which—­slip! bump! crash!!

I opened my eyes and found Alec bending over me, while “Begum” sat licking my hand.  I tried to speak, but did so with extreme difficulty, as if something were amiss with my chest.  Whatever had happened!  I tried to rise, but had not the power.

“How do you feel?” said Alec.

[Illustration:  A TERRIBLE FALL FROM THE CLIFFS.]

To which I replied by asking him a question,

“Whatever is the matter, Alec, am I hurt?” at which he laughed and said, “I ought to know better than he could tell me; perhaps I would inform him what I was doing there, and why, for more than half an hour since he found me I had been insensible?”

Then I remembered slipping carelessly over the edge of the path at a part that was not at all dangerous, and bumping myself against a granite rock, but beyond that I remembered nothing whatever.

Alec had missed me for nearly three hours, so calling to “Begum,” he strolled along to see what I was doing.  It was our invariable custom to tell each other where we were going, and what we were going to do, whenever we separated for a time; but on this occasion I had purposely omitted this precaution.  The dog had found me on the lower pathway doubled up, or as Alec put it, “Standing on my head in a very undignified position, with my back against a granite boulder.”

I could not rise, in fact could scarcely move, so battered and bruised was I in my fall of about fifty yards.  Of course this was not a perpendicular fall, or I should never have penned these lines; but as the slope was one that a man could not walk up without using his hands, it is a wonder to me to this day that I was not killed on the spot.  Evidently I had broken my swift fall by clutching at some furze bushes, for my right hand was dreadfully lacerated, and full of furze needles, and my shoulder so stiff that my arm seemed paralyzed; besides which, I found I was spitting blood, which frightened me very much, as I was afraid of some internal injury.

The cart was fetched, and Alec assisted me on it; but oh dear me!  I thought the jolting would have shaken me literally to pieces, so I sang out “Halt!  Wo!” and told Alec I could go no farther, and then I fainted away.