hat some morning he
might see the sails of a ship that would take him home. But none ever
came, and sometimes the tears ran down his cheeks because of the
sorrow he felt at being so utterly alone. At times even, he thought in
his misery that if he only had any kind of a boat, it would be better
to sail away, and chance reaching other land, rather than to stop
where he was. By and by, however, he grew less unhappy, for he had
plenty of work to do.

III

THE EARTHQUAKE AND HURRICANE; AND HOW ROBINSON BUILT A BOAT

Now about this time, when Robinson had been some months on the island,
heavy and constant rain began to fall, and sometimes weeks would pass
without a single dry day. He found that instead of there being spring,
summer, autumn, and winter, as in England, the seasons in his island
were divided into the wet and the dry. There was no cold weather, no
winter. It chanced that just before this first rain began, Robinson
had emptied out some refuse from bags which had once held rice, and
other grain, and he had forgotten all about having emptied them. So he
was very much astonished to find, some time afterwards, both barley
and rice growing near his tent, in the shade of the rock. The ears,
when ripe, he kept to sow again, and from this very small beginning,
in the course of a few seasons, he had a great quantity of grain, both
for food and for sowing. But this meant every year much hard work, for
he had no plow nor harrow, and all the ground had to be dug with a
clumsy spade, made from a very hard, heavy wood that grew on the
island.

At first Robinson could not grind the grain that he grew, nor make
bread from it. If he could have found a large stone, slightly hollow
on top, he might, by pounding the grain on it with another round
stone, have made very good meal. But all the stones he could find were
too soft, and in the end he had to make a sort of mill of hard wood,
in which he burnt a hollow place, and on that he pounded the grain
into meal with a heavy stick.

Baking he did by building a big fire, then raking away the ashes, and
putting the dough on the hot place, covered with a kind of basin made
of clay, over which he heaped the red ashes. In this way very good
bread can be made.

Before the rainy season was over, and just after he had finished the
fence round his tent, one day when Robinson was at work in the cave,
all of a sudden the earth began to fall from the roof, and the strong
props he