"It's quite romantic," said Belle, sitting down on a spar, and twisting some pink bindweed round her hat. "We could have tea here, and get up a dance on the sands afterwards. I've found such a pretty pencil-case among the drift-wood. I mean to keep it."
"I don't think any one else has discovered the island," said Isobel. "So we've quite a right to take possession, haven't we?"
"It's the very thing we want, and we'll annex it at once," said Charlie; and drawing the empty shell of a sea urchin from his pocket, he slipped it on to the top of a stick, which he planted firmly in the sand as an ensign; then climbing on to the summit of a rock close by, he waved his handkerchief to north, south, east, and west, exclaiming, "We hereby take solemn possession of this island in the name of the United Sea Urchins' Recreation Society, and are prepared to hold the same in legal right against all comers. If any one has just cause or impediment to offer why the said society should not occupy this territory in peace and prosperity, let him speak now, or hereafter for ever hold his peace. Rule, Britannia! God save the King!"
With a burst of cheers the others unanimously declared themselves witnesses to the deed, and decided that possession being nine-tenths of the law, the island, for the time at any rate, was undoubtedly their own, and until any one appeared to dispute their claim they would make what they pleased of it.
"To-morrow we'll rig out a real pioneer party of settlers, and come with hammers and nails and axes and all the rest of it," said Charlie. "Then we can put up a flag and decide on names and everything. We haven't time to explore the top now, though it looks jolly upon those cliffs; we must get back before the tide turns. It's a ripping place, but it would be no joke, all the same, to be surrounded and have to spend the night here."
The Sea Urchins took to the idea of a camp on a desert island with the greatest enthusiasm, and next day the elder portion of them started off with any tools which they could buy, beg, or borrow, anxious to set to work at once upon the task of constructing a dwelling from the wreck of the old schooner. By fastening a rope to the hull, they contrived to tug it out of the sand and tilt it on end against a rock; then with the aid of the broken planks which were lying near they propped it up securely and repaired any damaged or broken pieces, so that it made the most successful hut, a kind of combination of a Viking's hall with a pirate's cave or an Indian wigwam. The face of the cliff which formed the wall on one side was full of ledges and crevices which served admirably for cupboards, a few nails driven into the boards answered for hat pegs, and it was no difficult matter to put up shelves from odd pieces of drift-wood.
It was amazing how the work brought out the varying capacities of the settlers. To every one's surprise, Arthur Wright developed a perfect genius for carpentry. He had borrowed a few tools from a friendly joiner in the town, and constructed quite a tidy little table, forming the legs from broken masts; and he managed to make a door for the fortress of the best portions of three rotten planks, fastening it on with hinges cut from an old leather strap, and even putting a latch which would open with a string pulled from the outside.
While the boys did the harder part of the work, the girls contented themselves with the more feminine element of artistic decoration. They thatched the roof elaborately with masses of brown bladder-wrack sea-weed, tying it securely with pieces of cord; they fixed a row of twenty-one sea urchins, with the spines on, over the door as a coat of arms, one to represent each member of the club; and pink and white fan shells were nailed alternately round the window, with yellow periwinkles wedged between. A little garden was carefully laid out, a wall being made of stones and sand, and a path of fine gravel leading up to the door. Green sea-weed was put down to represent grass, the most wonderful arrangements in the way of cockles, mussels, and limpets took the place of flower-beds, and a few sea-pinks and harebells planted in tins rescued from the sand-bank adorned the window-sill. Inside, a fireplace had been built with stones at the rocky end, a hole being made in the roof to let out the smoke, and seats were dug from the sand sufficient to accommodate the whole party. A tin kettle and a frying-pan, purchased by subscription, constituted the cooking utensils of the camp, and the members waxed so eager over the domestic arrangements of their hut that they spent all their pennies at the cheap stalls in the market on tin mugs and plates and other articles likely to be of service to the community. Eric Wright denied himself toffee or caramels for three whole days—a heroic effort on his part—that he might contribute a certain gorgeous scarlet tea-tray on which he had set his young affections; the Rokebys clubbed together to buy muslin for window curtains; Belle presented a looking-glass as a suitable offering; and Mrs. Barrington, who was always generous when it was not a question of diet, allowed Ruth and Edna to purchase a dozen pewter teaspoons, a bright blue enamelled teapot, and a bread-and-butter plate with a picture of the Promenade at Ferndale upon it. The sand-bank was rummaged for anything that would come in handy, and though it did not yield such wonderful treasures as the wrecked ship generally contains in desert-island stories, they found several empty bottles, an old lantern, a dripping-tin, a wooden spoon, and a battered bird-cage, all of which they decided might come in useful in course of time and were carefully put by in a safe place among the rocks.
Isobel, who toiled away at the camp with untiring zeal, had drawn and painted a very nice map of the island on a sheet of cardboard, all the various places being neatly marked, and had nailed it on the wall inside. After a good deal of discussion it had been decided to call the domain "Rocky Holme," the crag on the extreme summit was "Point Look-Out," the tall cliff to the north, "Sea-Birds' Cape," while the one on the south was "Welcome Head." The creek where they had established their headquarters was christened by the appropriate name of "Sandy Cove," and the hut bore the more romantic title of "Wavelet Hall." They had fixed a broken mast at the end of the little garden for a flagstaff, and ran up an ensign specially designed and executed for them by Mrs. Stewart, consisting of a large sea urchin cut out of white calico, and stitched upon a ground of turkey-red twill, with the initials "U.S.U.R.S." below; so that, with their colours floating in the breeze and the smoke of their fire rising in a thin white column among the rocks, no band of colonists could have felt that the country was more really and truly their own.