Nothing but--as the days of it ran on--a growing solicitude as to what he was going to live on if it continued much longer.
Never was Sark rabbit so completely demolished as was that one that Nance had cooked and sent him.

Before he had done with it he cracked the very bones he had thrown away, for the sake of what was in them, and finally chewed the softer parts of the bones themselves to cheat himself into the belief that he was eating.
That was after he had devoured every crumb of his bread, and finished his three fishes to the extreme points of their tails.
He was, I said, in the very midst of the turmoil yet unaffected by it.
But that was not so in some respects.
Bodily, as we have seen, the storm bore hardly upon him, since rabbit-bones and fish-tails can hardly be looked upon as a nutritious or inviting dietary.
But mentally and spiritually the mighty elemental upheaval was wholly crushing and uplifting.
As he cowered, with humming head, under the fierce unremitting rush of the gale, and felt the great stones of his shelter tremble in it, and watched the huge green hills of water, with their roaring white crests, go sweeping past to crash in thunder on the cliffs of Sark, he felt smaller than he had ever felt before--and that, as a rule, and if it come not of self-abnegation through a man's own sin or folly, is entirely to his good; possibly in the other case also.
To feel infinitely small and helpless in the hands of an Infinitely Great is a spiritual education to any man, and it was so to this man.
He felt himself, in that universal chaos, no more than a speck of helpless dust amid the whirling wheels of Nature's inexplicable machinery, and clung the tighter to the simple fundamental facts of which his heart was sure--behind and above all this was God, who held all these things in His hand.

And over there in Sark was Nance, the very thought of whom was like a coal of fire in his heart, which all the gales that ever blew, and all the soddened soaking of ceaseless rain from above and ceaseless spray from below, could not even dim.
For long-continued and relentless buffeting such as this tells upon any man, no matter what his strength of mind or body to begin with; and a perpetually soaked body is apt in time to sodden the soul, unless it have something superhuman to cling to, as this man had in his simple trust in God and the girl he loved.
In all those stressful days, so far as he could see, the tides--which in those parts rise and fall some forty feet, as you may see by the scoured bases of the towering cliffs--seemed always at the full, the westerly gale driving in the waters remorselessly and piling them up against the land without cessation, and as though bent on its destruction.
Great gouts of clotted foam flew over his head in clouds, and plastered his rock with shivering sponges.

The sheets of spray from his south-west rocks lashed him incessantly.

His shelter was as wet inside as out, as he was himself.
He felt empty and hungry at times, but never thirsty; his skin absorbed moisture enough and to spare.