“Mr. Button!”
“Well, honey?”
“I know g’ography.”
“And what’s that?” asked Mr. Button.
This stumped Emmeline for a moment.
“It’s where places are,” she said at last.
“Which places?” enquired he.
“All sorts of places,” replied Emmeline. “Mr. Button!”
“What is it, darlin’?”
“Would you like to learn g’ography?”
“I’m not wishful for larnin’,” said the other hurriedly. “It makes me head buzz to hear them things they rade out of books.”
“Paddy,” said Dick, who was strong on drawing that afternoon, “look here.” He drew the following on the sand:
“That’s an elephant,” he said in a dubious voice.
Mr. Button grunted, and the sound was by no means filled with enthusiastic assent. A chill fell on the proceedings.
Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline felt disheartened. Then her face suddenly cleared; the seraphic smile came into it for a moment—a bright idea had struck her.
“Dicky,” she said, “draw Henry the Eight.”
Dick’s face brightened. He cleared the sand and drew the following figure:
“That’s not Henry the Eight,” he explained, “but he will be in a minute. Daddy showed me how to draw him; he’s nothing till he gets his hat on.”
“Put his hat on, put his hat on!” implored Emmeline, gazing alternately from the figure on the sand to Mr. Button’s face, watching for the delighted smile with which she was sure the old man would greet the great king when he appeared in all his glory.
Then Dick with a single stroke of the cane put Henry’s hat on.
Now, no portrait could be liker to his monk-hunting majesty than the above, created with one stroke of a cane (so to speak), yet Mr. Button remained unmoved.
“I did it for Mrs. Sims,” said Dick regretfully, “and she said it was the image of him.”
“Maybe the hat’s not big enough,” said Emmeline, turning her head from side to side as she gazed at the picture. It looked right, but she felt there must be something wrong, as Mr. Button did not applaud. Has not every true artist felt the same before the silence of some critic?
Mr. Button tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself, and the class rose and trooped down to the lagoon edge, leaving Henry and his hat a figure on the sand to be obliterated by the wind.
After a while, as time went on, Mr. Button took to his lessons as a matter of course, the small inventions of the children assisting their utterly untrustworthy knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any other there amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky.
Days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months, without the appearance of a ship—a fact which gave Mr. Button very little trouble; and even less to his charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about ships.
The rainy season came on them with a rush, and at the words “rainy season” do not conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy day in Manchester.
The rainy season here was quite a lively time. Torrential showers followed by bursts of sunshine, rainbows, and rain-dogs in the sky, and the delicious perfume of all manner of growing things on the earth.
After the rains the old sailor said he’d be after making a house of bamboos before the next rains came on them; but, maybe, before that they’d be off the island.
“However,” said he, “I’ll dra’ you a picture of what it’ll be like when it’s up;” and on the sand he drew a figure like this:
Having thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a cocoa-palm and lit his pipe. But he had reckoned without Dick.
The boy had not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen desire to see one built, and help to build one. The ingenuity which is part of the multiform basis of the American nature was aroused.
“How’re you going to keep them from slipping, if you tie them together like that?” he asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method.
“Which from slippin’?”
“The canes—one from the other?”
“After you’ve fixed thim, one cross t’other, you drive a nail through the crosspiece and a rope over all.”
“Have you any nails, Paddy?”
“No,” said Mr. Button, “I haven’t.”
“Then how’re you goin’ to build the house?”
“Ax me no questions now; I want to smoke me pipe.”
But he had raised a devil difficult to lay. Morning, noon, and night it was “Paddy, when are you going to begin the house?” or, “Paddy, I guess I’ve got a way to make the canes stick together without nailing.” Till Mr. Button, in despair, like a beaver, began to build.
There was great cane-cutting in the canebrake above, and, when sufficient had been procured, Mr. Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster.
The tireless Dick, young and active, with no original laziness in his composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted to build a house.
Mr. Button didn’t. He wanted to rest. He did not mind fishing or climbing a coconut tree, which he did to admiration by passing a rope round himself and the tree, knotting it, and using it as a support during the climb; but house-building was monotonous work.
He said he had no nails. Dick countered by showing how the canes could be held together by notching them.
“And, faith, but it’s a cliver boy
