The wind had blown down the cross again, sometime in the night.

The trouble, thought Ogden Russell, sitting up and rubbing his eyes to rid them of the seeping pus that had hardened while he slept, was that sand was a poor

thing in which to set a cross. Perhaps, if he could find them, several sizable boulders placed around its base might serve to hold it upright against the river breeze.

He'd have to do something about it, for it was not mete nor proper that the cross, poor thing that it might be, should topple with every passing gust. It was not, he told himself, consistent with his piety and purpose.

He wondered, sitting there upon the sand, with the morning laughter of the river in his ears, if he had been as wise as he had thought in picking out this tiny island as his place of solitude. It had solitude, all right, but it had little else. The one thing that it lacked, quite noticeably, was comfort. Although comfort, he reminded himself quite sternly, had been a quality that he had not sought. There had been comfort back where he had come from, in that world he'd turned his back upon, and he could have kept it by simply staying there. But he had forsaken comfort, and many other things as well, in this greater search for something which he could sense and feel but which, as yet, he had not come to grips with.

Although I've tried, he thought. My God, how I have tried!

He arose and stretched, carefully and gingerly, for he had, it seemed, an ache in eveiy bone and a soreness in each muscle. It's this sleeping out, he thought, that does it, exposed to the wind and to the river damp, without so much as a ragged blanket to drape his huddled self. With almost nothing to cover him, in fact, for the only thing he wore was an ancient pair of trousers, chopped above the knees.