For one thing, their entire supply of meat was destroyed; so was their bread and their coffee.
“We shall not starve, anyhow,” Cal decided. “We can kill as much game as we need and as the bottom doesn’t seem to have dropped out of the sea, we can still catch fish, oysters, shrimps and crabs. As for bread, we still have Tom’s sweet potato patch to draw upon. There wasn’t more than a pound of coffee left, so that’s no great loss.”
For the rest, the very few clothes the boys had brought with them in addition to what they wore, were all lost, but they decided that they could get on without them—“Mr. Dunbar’s fashion.” Tom was the worst sufferer in that respect, as the garments he wore had been badly torn in his rescue from the fire, but he cheerfully announced:
“I can manage very well. I’ll decline all dinner, dance and other invitations that require a change from every-day dress. I’ll have some cards engraved announcing that ‘Mr. Thomas Garnett is detained at the South and will not be at home to receive his friends until further notice.’ Then I’ll borrow some of your beetle-detaining pins, Mr. Dunbar, and pin up the worst of the rents in my trousers.”
“We’ll do better than that, Tom,” the naturalist answered. “I’ve quite a little sewing kit tucked away in my log locker. You shall have needles, thread and a thimble whenever you wish to use them.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dunbar; but please spare me the thimble. I never could use a contrivance of that kind. Every time I have tried I have succeeded only in driving the needle into my hand and breaking it off well beneath the skin.”
“Boy like,” answered Dunbar. “You’re the victim of a traditional defect in our system of education.”
“Would you mind explaining?” asked Cal.
“Certainly not. I hold that the education of every human being ought to include a reasonable mastery of all the simple arts that one is likely to find useful in emergencies. We do not expect girls to become accountants, as a rule, but we do not on that account leave the multiplication table out of a girl’s school studies. In the same way we do not expect boys generally to do much sewing when they grow to manhood, but as every man is liable to meet emergencies in which a little skill in the use of needle, thread and scissors may make all the difference between comfort and discomfort, every boy ought to be taught plain sewing. However, we have other things to think of just now.”
“Indeed we have,” answered Cal, “and the most pressing one of those other things is to-morrow morning’s breakfast. Does it occur to any of you that, except the salt in the dory’s locker, we haven’t an ounce of food of any kind in our possession?”