around to the north again. The Dean was
already wide awake. When I asked him how he was, he said he felt much
better, only his head still pained him greatly, and he was very thirsty
and hungry.

"I got up immediately, and assisted the Dean to rise. He was a little
dizzy at first, but after sitting down for a few minutes on a rock he
recovered himself. Then I brought him some water in an egg-shell to
drink. And then I gave him a raw egg, which he swallowed as if it had
been the daintiest morsel in the world. 'It's lucky, isn't it,' said he,
'that there are so many eggs about?' After a moment I observed that he
was laughing, which very much surprised me, as that would have been
about the last thing that ever would have entered into my head to do.
'Do you know,' he asked, 'what a very ridiculous figure we are cutting?
Look, we are all covered over with feathers. I have heard of people
being tarred and feathered, but never heard of anything like this. Let's
pick each other.'

"Sure enough we were literally covered over with the down in which we
had been sleeping, and when I saw what a jest the poor Dean, with his
sore head, made of the plight we were in, I forgot all my own troubles
and joined in the laugh with him.

"We now fell to work picking each other, as the Dean had suggested, and
were soon as clean of feathers as any other well-plucked geese.

"By this time the Dean's clothes had become entirely dry; so each
dressed himself in the clothes that belonged to him, and then we started
over to the nearest brook, where we bathed our hands and faces, drying
them on an old bandanna handkerchief which I was lucky enough to have in
my pocket. I had to support the Dean a little as we went along, for he
was very weak; but in spite of this his spirits were excellent, and when
he saw, for the first time, the ducks fly up, he said, 'What a great
pair of silly dunces they must take us for,--coming into such a place as
this.'

"After we had refreshed ourselves at the brook, and eaten some more
eggs, we very naturally began to talk. I related to the Dean, more
particularly than I had done before, the events of the shipwreck and our
escape, and what I had discovered on the island, and then made some
allusion to the prospect ahead of us. To my great surprise, the Dean was
not apparently in the least cast down about it. In truth, he took it
much more resignedly, and had a more hopeful eye to the future, than I
had. 'If,' said he,