had left the cooking and fishing and general gathering
of food as much as possible to Dick.

"It amuses the craythur to pritind he's doing things," he would say, as
he watched Dick delving in the earth to make a little
oven--Island-fashion--for the cooking of fish or what-not.

"Come along, Em," said Dick, piling the broken wood on top of some
rotten hibiscus sticks; "give me the tinder box."

He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not
unlike Aeolus as represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of
schiedam and snuff, and give one mermaids and angels instead of
soundings.

The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on sticks in
profusion, for there was plenty of fuel, and he wanted to cook
breadfruit.

The breadfruit varies in size, according to age, and in colour
according to season. These that Dick was preparing to cook were as
large as small melons. Two would be more than enough for three people's
breakfast. They were green and knobbly on the outside, and they
suggested to the mind unripe lemons, rather than bread.

He put them in the embers, just as you put potatoes to roast, and
presently they sizzled and spat little venomous jets of steam, then
they cracked, and the white inner substance became visible. He cut
them open and took the core out--the core is not fit to eat--and they
were ready.

Meanwhile, Emmeline, under his directions, had not been idle.

There were in the lagoon--there are in several other tropical lagoons I
know of--a fish which I can only describe as a golden herring. A bronze
herring it looks when landed, but when swimming away down against the
background of coral brains and white sand patches, it has the sheen of
burnished gold. It is as good to eat as to look at, and Emmeline was
carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.

The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were
accidents at times, when a whole fish would go into the fire, amidst
shouts of derision from Dick.

She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the "skirt" round the
waist looking not unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent,
and filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips
puckered out at the heat of the fire.

"It's so hot!" she cried in self-defence, after the first of the
accidents.

"Of course it's hot," said Dick, "if you stick to looward of the fire.
How often has Paddy told you to keep to windwa