e'd have to think about it, that
to-morrow or next day he'd be after getting some notion how to do it
without rope. But Dick pointed out that the brown cloth which Nature
has wrapped round the cocoa-palm stalks would do instead of rope if cut
in strips. Then the badgered one gave in.

They laboured for a fortnight at the thing, and at the end of that time
had produced a rough sort of wigwam on the borders of the chapparel.

Out on the reef, to which they often rowed in the dinghy, when the tide
was low, deep pools would be left, and in the pools fish. Paddy said
if they had a spear they might be able to spear some of these fish, as
he had seen the natives do away "beyant" in Tahiti.

Dick enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a
ten-foot cane sharpened at the end after the fashion of a quill pen.

"Sure, what's the use of that?" said Mr Button. "You might job it into
a fish, but he'd be aff it in two ticks; it's the barb that holds them."

Next day the indefatigable one produced the cane amended; he had
whittled it down about three feet from the end and on one side, and
carved a fairly efficient barb. It was good enough, at all events, to
spear a "groper" with, that evening, in the sunset-lit pools of the
reef at low tide.

"There aren't any potatoes here," said Dick one day, after the second
rains.

"We've et 'em all months ago," replied Paddy.

"How do potatoes grow?" enquired Dick.

"Grow, is it? Why, they grow in the ground; and where else would they
grow?" He explained the process of potato-planting: cutting them into
pieces so that there was an eye in each piece, and so forth. "Having
done this," said Mr Button, "you just chuck the pieces in the ground;
their eyes grow, green leaves `pop up,' and then, if you dug the roots
up maybe, six months after, you'd find bushels of potatoes in the
ground, ones as big as your head, and weeny ones. It's like a family of
childer--some's big and some's little. But there they are in the
ground, and all you have to do is to take a fark and dig a potful of
them with a turn of your wrist, as many a time I've done it in the ould
days."

"Why didn't we do that?" asked Dick.

"Do what?" asked Mr Button.

"Plant some of the potatoes."

"And where'd we have found the spade to plant them with?"

"I guess we could have fixed up a spade," replied the boy. "I made a
spade at home, out of a piece of old board once--daddy helped."

"Well, skelp off wit