So he searched the length of yellow sand. But he found nothing there excepting a few empty shells, pink and gray, like the glow of a pearl. He searched the mosses under the palm trees—but only a few nuts had fallen from the tufts overhead, and these were so hard and so bitter that the taste of them puckered up his face with sour twists. He climbed the hill of glistening stone until he could see from its summit the tops of thousands and thousands more of just such trees—like so many green and waving feather dusters—a whole forestful, swaying to the horizon’s boundary.
And there at last, on the tip top of the rocks, he seized upon a handful of the purple flowers and another of the orange-leaved vine.
“If nothing else,” he planned, “I shall make a dainty salad of flower and leaf and eat it from a plate of pearly sea-shell.”
But alas! he was still to learn the evil of plucking strange things for salads!
V
PETERKIN’S COOKING
HIS arms full of leaves and flowers, Peterkin hurried back to the little black cave, where his stove was in hiding.