It proved to be salt sure enough, although so impure that it seemed useless, till my wife dissolved and strained it, when it became fit to put in the soup.
`Why not use the sea-water itself?' asked Jack.
`Because,' said Ernest, `it is not only salt, but bitter too.
Just try it.'
`Now,' said my wife, tasting the soup with the stick with which she had been stirring it, `dinner is ready, but where can Fritz be?' she continued, a little anxiously. `And how are we to eat our soup when he does come?' she continued. `We have neither plates nor spoons. Why did we not remember to bring some from the ship?'
"Because, my dear, one cannot think of everything at once. We shall be fortunate if we do not find even more things we have forgotten."
"But we can scarcely lift the boiling pot to our mouths," she said.
I was forced to agree. We all looked upon the pot with perplexity, rather like the fox in the fable, to whom the stork served up a dinner in a jug with a long neck. Silence was at length broken, when all of us burst into hearty laughter at our own folly in not remembering that spoons and forks were things of absolute necessity.
`Oh, for a few cocoanut shells!' sighed Ernest.
`Oh, for half a dozen plates and as many silver spoons!' rejoined
I, smiling.
`Really though, oyster-shells would do,' said he, after a moment's thought.