“Then why don’t you set about it; I am sure Marie has not forgotten you.”
“Oh! I will not stand that; why should we make a toil of pleasure? I mean to have a regular breakfast, and a pot of hot coffee—why not? we have the whole day before us.”
“Well, I do not mind; hail Birger—there is a dissolute island, as Jacob calls it, before us; we will boil your pot there.”
Birger was always ready for his grub, or, indeed, for anything else that was proposed; and the boats were made fast to some rocky prominences on the lea of the island, with a boat-keeper in each, to prevent them from grinding one another to pieces.
Strange to say, many of these islets, which are mere rocks, contain fresh water, some of them in pools in the rocks, but many in regular springs, and in this particular case a very respectable little streamlet trickled down a crevice of the rock.
Every beach, rock, and islet on the Norwegian coast is fringed with a layer of drift-wood, in pieces of every size, from the great baulk which in England would be worth five or six pounds down to the smallest splinters. The reason of this is, that each river is continually floating down its yearly freight of pines to the sea; these are caught by a boom at the mouth,—that is to say, by a floating chain of squared pine-stems,—but many dip under this and escape, many escape when it is opened to let boats pass, and occasionally a freshet breaks a link or draws a staple, in which case the whole boom-full of timber floats out to sea at once. All this is irrecoverably lost, for it is illegal to pick up timber floating; and a very necessary law this is, or the booms would find themselves broken much oftener than they are. Nevertheless, the quantity of timber lost annually in that way would pretty nearly supply all the wants of all the English dockyards put together. But “it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good;”—the wanderer on the sea coast need never be without a fire to warm himself by.
“I like this,” said the Captain, as he lay on his back looking up to the sky, watching the blue smoke as it came in wreaths above his head. “I should like to be a Robinson Crusoe now, with a desolate island of my own, like this, where the foot of man has never trod, and—Holloa! What the devil have we got now?” he said, jumping up;—“how came these little animals here?”
The little animals referred to were half a dozen children, with rakes and hay-forks in their hands, who, attracted by the smoke and possibly by the smell of the fried ham, were peering over the edge of the cliff like so many sea-gulls.
“These are the savages, Mr. Crusoe,” said the Parson, quietly; “but it really is a curious thing, so let us climb up the cliff and see what they are about.”
The cliff was not difficult to scale, for the edges of the rocks were like steps; and at the top a very unexpected scene met their eye: a regular hay-field, with the hay in cocks, and five or six men and women at work at it; they were carrying their cocks on a sort of handbier down to their boats,—great, broad, heavy affairs these were, borrowed from the horse-ferry,—and upon these they were building hay-stacks, intending to take them in tow of their whale-boats, during the calm, and to bring them to the main land.