"And," replied he, still smiling, "when you get to the end of your quest, I believe you will 'shake hands with a shadow' as I told you before. But, Bold Crusoe, I will do my best to help you as a good comrade should, so I will bottle up my hilarious mood till you find your treasure, and then I will explode."
"Very well, Monday," I replied. "I trust soon to be able to make you have a perfect earthquake when I shew you Old Barbe Rouge's 'Petites fées.' Fenêtre will not do. Now what are we standing near that commences in French with the letter P?"
Monday looked about and quickly said,
"La porte, the door, porche, the porch; how will they do?"
"Capital! now we are surely on the right track."
So again we brought our measuring stick into play, but again the measure was not quite right, but still not far out. We made it nearly eleven yards instead of ten, and although not perfectly correct, it gave me great hope.
With but little trouble we made out the letters PM to be Porte Magasin (door of the store house), and again we were about a yard too much in the measurement. So we left it, and proceeded to the last point, the letters CC.
The point was outside the walls, and the longest distance of all—the figures twenty being written on the line. As in the other instances I asked Monday the names of all kinds of objects to locate the letters CC, but failed in this, except that I presumed C might be Chaumière = Cottage.
Next taking our stand at the point which we supposed the centre of the diagram—the place of the skull—we measured twenty yards towards the cottage, but it fell short of the nearest point of the building by nearly six feet; therefore probably it did not refer to the cottage at all.
We assumed therefore, that a tree or some such object, to which the letters CC referred, once stood on what was now a pathway joining the cottage.