THE DONKEY SEES RED." 13 



interest in this bit of amateur work. We wanted to help. 

 There seemed to be nothing more fascinating than making 

 jetties and getting thoroughly messed up with cement — 

 on a coral island. The sudden news of this ship's arrival, 

 brought by one of the " boys," who came running from 

 the Point ; the picture we got of her as she came into 

 view from behind the palm -grown headland and sounded 

 her siren ; and still more, when, after less than an hour's 

 stay, she gave a farewell blast and sailed away again to 

 disappear beneath the far horizon, seemed events quite 

 out of the ordinary run of one's experiences. It made 

 us feel how lonely these people must have been at times. 

 We almost knew now how it felt to be marooned. 



One day, again, the donkey, which was given to irrelevant 

 fits of fury, suddenly " saw red," rushed at an inoffensive 

 caK, and before anyone could interfere had " savaged " 

 it to death. When you have only one calf on an isolated 

 island, and that caK is the special care and pet of the lady 

 superior, this is an event of the first magnitude. No 

 cold-blooded murder in some big city could have caused 

 a greater shock to the even tenour of this peaceful httle 

 world ; and when, after a solemn court-martial at which 

 the death sentence was passed, the donkey was, then and 

 there, led forth, to expiate his crime — not by any means 

 the first, as we learnt — we felt almost as if a shadow had 

 momentarily darkened the fair semblance of this island 

 paradise. On another occasion, when some iguanas made 

 a raid on the kitchen garden and ate up all Madame 's 

 carefully cherished salads, the enormity of the offence 

 assumed the proportions of a general railway strike. 



One took an exaggerated interest, indeed, in almost 

 everything on the island ; for everything seemed to have an 

 altogether different value from what it would elsewhere. 

 One even viewed the pigs from a different standpoint, 

 especially when one noticed that their styes were small 

 natural caverns in the coral limestone, and that gaily 

 flowering morning-glories hung in festoons around the 

 confines of their yard. 



