“But, as I was saying, about making a Sunday for ourselves. I did everything I could to refresh my memory about it. I counted up the number of times we had slept, and the number of times we had worked, and recalled the day when I first walked around the island; and I tried my best to connect all those events together in such a way as to prove how often the sun had passed behind the cliffs, and how often it had shone upon us; and thus I made out that the very day I am telling you about proved to be Sunday,—at least I so convinced the Dean, and he was satisfied. And that’s the way we made a Sunday for ourselves.
“So we resolved to do no work that day; and this was well, for we were very weary and needed rest.
“I need not tell you that we passed the time in talking over our plans for the future, and in discussing the prospects ahead of us, and arranging what we should do. You see we had settled about Sunday, so that was off our minds; and after recalling many things which had happened to us, and things which had been done on the Blackbird, we finally concluded that we had found out the day of the month, and so we called the day ‘Sunday, the second of July,’ and this we marked, as I will show you, thus: On the top of a large flat rock near by I placed a small white stone, and this we called our ‘Sunday stone’; and then, in a row with this stone, we placed six other stones, which we called by the other days of the week. Then I moved the white stone out of line a little, which was to show that Sunday had passed, and afterwards, when the next day had gone, we did the same with the Monday stone, and so on until the stones were all on a line again, when we knew that it was once more Sunday. Of course we knew when the day was gone, by the sun being around on the north side of the island, throwing the shadow of the cliffs upon us.
“For noting the days of the month we made a similar arrangement to that which we had made for the days of the week; and thus you see we had now got an almanac among other things.
“‘And now,’ said the Dean, ‘let us put all this down for fear we forget it.’ So away the little fellow ran and gathered a great quantity of small pebbles, and these we arranged on the top of the rock so as to form letters; and the letters that we thus made spelled out
‘John Hardy and Richard Dean,
Cast away in the Cold,
Tuesday, June 27, 1824.’
“Now, when we came to look ahead, and to speculate upon what was likely to befall us, we saw that we had two months of summer still remaining; and, as midsummer had hardly come yet, we knew that we were likely to have it warmer than before, and we had now no further fears about being able to live through that period. In these two months it was plain that one of two things must happen,—a ship must come along and take us off, or we must be prepared for the dark time that must follow after the sun should go down for the winter; otherwise a third thing would certainly happen, that is, we should both die,—an event which did not, in any case, seem at all unlikely; so we pledged ourselves to stand by each other through every fortune, each helping the other all he could. At any rate, we would not lose hope, and never despair of being saved, through the mercy of Providence, somehow or other.
“Having reached this resigned state of mind, we were ready to consider rationally what we had to do. It was clear enough that, if we only looked out for a ship to save us, and that chance should in the end fail, we would be ill prepared for the winter if we were left on the island to encounter its perils. Therefore it was necessary to be ready for the worst, and accordingly, after a little deliberation, we concluded to proceed as follows:—
“1st. We would construct a place to shelter ourselves from the cold and storms. (In this we had made some satisfactory progress already.)
“2d. We would collect all the food we could while there was opportunity.