It was broad daylight on the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-fourth day of November, when they set out upon their tour. Robert carried the wallet of provision, consisting of parched corn, jerked venison, and a few hard crackers of Mary's manufacture; in his belt he fastened a flat powder flask filled with water, being the best substitute he could devise for a canteen. Harold carried the blanket rolled like a wallet, and Frank's hatchet stuck in his belt.
Willing to ascertain the coastwise dimensions of the island, and also the approaches to it from sea, they directed their course along the hard smooth beach, occasionally ascending the bluff for the purpose of observing the adjacent country. Their rate of travelling was at first intentionally slow, for they were both pedestrians enough to know that the more slowly a journey is commenced, the more likely it is to be comfortably continued.
At the end of six miles they plainly discerned the southern extremity of the island, lying a mile beyond, and marked by a high bank of sand, thrown up in such profusion as almost to smother a group of dwarfish, ill-formed cedars. Beyond the bluff they saw the river setting eastward from the sea, and bordered on its further side with a dense growth of mangroves. Satisfied with this discovery, and observing that, after proceeding inland for a few miles, the river bent suddenly to the north, they turned their faces eastward, resolved to strike for some point upon the bank. The sterile soil of the beach, and its overhanging bluff, which was varied only by an occasional clump of cedars and a patch of prickly pears, with now and then a tall palmetto, that stood as a gigantic sentry over its pigmy companions, was exchanged as they receded from the coast, first for a thick undergrowth of low shrubs and a small variety of oak, then for trees still larger, which were oftentimes covered with vines, whose long festoons and pendant branches were loaded with clusters of blue and purple grapes. About midway of the island the surface made a sudden ascent, assuming that peculiar character known as "hammock," and which, to unpractised eyes, looks like a swamp upon an elevated ridge.
Before leaving the beach the boys had quenched their thirst at a spring of cool, fresh water, found by scratching in the sand at high water mark, but which they would not have been able to enjoy had it not been for a simple device of Robert's. The sand was so soft and oozy, that before the basin they had excavated was sufficiently full to dish from, its sides had fallen in. Harold had tried at several places, but failing in all, he hallooed to Robert, whom he had left behind, to know what had been his success.
"Come and see," was the reply. Harold went, but saw nothing.
"There is my spring," said Robert, pointing to the end of a reed like that of a pipe-stem, sticking out of the sand. "Suck at that," he continued, "and you will get all that you want."
Harold tried it, and rose delighted. "Capital!" he exclaimed; "but how do you keep the sand from rising with the water?"
Robert drew out the reed, and showed him a piece of cloth fastened as a strainer on its lower end. "I have often thus quenched my thirst when fishing on our sandy beaches, and have never found it to fail."
"It is exceedingly simple," remarked Harold. "I wonder I never saw it nor heard of it before."
"So do I," rejoined Robert; "and yet I question whether I should ever have heard of it myself, had it not been for the Hottentots."