ve again:

[Foe's Narrative Concluded]

"Wild duck--? good! Yes, we used to have wild duck on the island.
. . . There were lagoons on the east side, fairly teeming with them,
and we fixed up a decoy. I don't pretend that we fixed up an orange
salad like this, with curacao: but in the beginning we practised with
limes, and later on I invented one of sliced bananas, with a sort of
spirit I brewed from the fruit. Also we found bait in the pools, not
so much unlike the whitebait we've been eating--I used to frizzle it
in palm oil. And once I achieved turtle soup. . . . He was the only
fellow that, in two years, we ever managed to collar and lay on his
back; and the soup, after all was no great success. But turtle's
eggs. . . . I can tell you all about turtle's eggs. That dog had a
nose for them like a pig's for truffles.

"Don't be afraid, Roddy. In this sophisticated den of high living
and moderate thinking I'm not going to give you the Swiss Family
Robinson; though I could double no trumps and risk it on the author
of that yarn--whoever he may have been--if he had only dealt from a
single pack, which he didn't. Farrell and I didn't build a house in
a tree, because we didn't need to; and we didn't ride on emus,
because we didn't want to, and moreover there weren't any. But we
did pretty well there for two years, Roddy: and could say as
Gonzalo--was it Gonzalo?--said of another island, that here was
everything advantageous to life. And we found the means to live,
too.

"I may say that I took the role of Mrs. Beeton: hunted for fruits,
fished, told Farrell (of my small botanical knowledge) what to eat,
drink, and avoid, and attended to the high cuisine. Farrell,
reverting to his old journeyman skill, sawed planks and knocked up a
hut. When one hut became intolerable for the pair of us--for in all
that time we never ceased hating--he knocked up a second and better
one for my habitation. He was my hewer of wood and drawer of water.
Also it was he who--since I professed no eagerness to get away--did
the conventional thing that castaways do: erected a flag-staff, and
hauled piles of brushwood up to the topmost lip of our volcano, for a
bonfire to be lit if any ship should be sighted, lest it might pass
in the night. I had resigned the binoculars to him, but he never
brought report of a sail.

"On two points--which served us again and again for furious
quarrels--the fool was quite obstinate. He would not b