Page:The Wreck of a World - Grove - 1890.djvu/109

Rh , as they served to occupy our minds, and prevent them from dwelling on the graver aspects of our past and future. Steering thence for the Sandwich Islands we encountered a cyclone which caused us much anxiety and some damage, but in spite of all misadventures we arrived safely at our destination six weeks after leaving the mouth of the Mississippi.

We found our new home as wild an any of the desert islands discovered by our early explorers. Here too the race of man seemed to be extinct. What miracle had happened to depopulate all quarters of the globe at once? Were we destined to be only the last devoured by the Cyclops? Yet here indeed the natural process of deterioration may have accounted for an extinction which it would surely have produced in a few years. At all events the absence of natives or other whites than ourselves simplified a good many problems that I had foreseen as likely to arise.

It was the 4th of September 1949, that we dropped anchor in a deep land-locked bay. Every soul was on deck, even our friend the President, to witness the landing of the relics of the ancient world on the soil