ing to the scull, which was the tent's main prop and support.

"Now," said he, "if you be gettin' up and walkin' about in the night,
it's down the tint will be on top of us all."

And, sure enough, in the small hours of the morning, it was.

CHAPTER XV

FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE

"I don't want my old britches on! I don't want my old britches on!"

Dick was darting about naked on the sand, Mr Button after him with a
pair of small trousers in his hand. A crab might just as well have
attempted to chase an antelope.

They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the
keenest joy in life to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows
of the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free from
the curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form of
breeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sun
and the sea.

The very first command Mr Button had given on the second morning of
their arrival was, "Strip and into the water wid you."

Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline (who rarely wept) had stood
weeping in her little chemise. But Mr Button was obdurate. The
difficulty at first was to get them in; the difficulty now was to keep
them out.

Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star, drying in the morning sun
after her dip, and watching Dick's evolutions on the sand.

The lagoon had for the children far more attraction than the land.
Woods where you might knock ripe bananas off the trees with a big cane,
sands where golden lizards would scuttle about so tame that you might
with a little caution seize them by the tail, a hill-top from whence
you might see, to use Paddy's expression, "to the back of beyond"; all
these were fine enough in their way, but they were nothing to the
lagoon.

Deep down where the coral branches were you might watch, whilst Paddy
fished, all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and between
the coral tufts. Hermit crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing the
evicted ones' shells--an obvious misfit; sea anemones as big as roses.
Flowers that closed up in an irritable manner if you lowered the hook
gently down and touched them; extraordinary shells that walked about on
feelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way and terrorising the whelks.
The overlords of the sand patches, these; yet touch one on the back
with a stone tied to a bit of string, and down he would go flat,
motionless and feigning death. Ther