The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking scarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whaleboat’s nose was touching her quarter. Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.
In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of coloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a form that was half hidden by her body, the other clasped partly to herself, partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They were natives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mischance from some inter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped in the girl’s hand was a branch of some tree, and on the branch a single withered berry.
“Are they dead?” asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in the boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whaleboat trying to see.
“No,” said Stannistreet; “they are asleep.”
Colophon
The Blue Lagoon
was published in 1908 by
Henry de Vere Stacpoole.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Michael English,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1996 by
Edward A. Malone, Roger Frank, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Man of War Rocks, Coast of Dorset,
a painting completed in 1884 by
John Brett.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.
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