`While staying with my Dutch friends at the Cape,' replied she,
`I often saw it, and at once recognized the leaves on Shark Island. Once knowing the secret, the preparation of the dish is extremely simple: the leaves are soaked in water, fresh every day, for a week, and then boiled for a few hours with orange juice, citron and sugar.'
We were all delighted with the delicacy, and thanked my wife for it most heartily, the boys declaring that they must at once go off again to the island to collect as many of the leaves as they could find. I agreed to accompany them, for I wished to examine the plantations we had made there.
All were flourishing, the palms and mangroves had shot up in a most marvellous manner, and many of the seeds which I had cast at random amongst the clefts in the rocks had germinated, and promised to clothe the nakedness of the frowning boulders.
A way up among the rocks too we discovered a bright sparkling spring of delicious water, at which, from the footprints around, we saw that the antelopes must have refreshed themselves.
Finding everything so satisfactory, we were naturally anxious to discover how our colony and plantations on Whale Island had fared. It was evident at a glance that the rabbits had increased, the young and tender shoots of the trees bore the marks of many greedy mischievous little teeth. The cocoanut palms alone had they spared.
Such depredations as these could not be allowed, and with the help of the boys I erected round each stem a hedge of prickly thorn, and then prepared again to embark; before we did so, however, I noticed that some of the seaweed had also been gnawed by the rabbits, and wondering what it could have been to tempt them, I collected some of it to examine more fully at home.
The skeleton of the whale, too, attracted our attention, for picked clean by the birds and bleached by sun and rain the bones had been purified to a most perfect whiteness. Thinking that the joints of the vertebrae might be made of use, I separated some ten or twelve, and rolled them down to the boat, and then returned to the shore, towing them after us.
A scheme now occupied my mind for the construction of a crushing machine which would prove of the greatest service to us. I knew that to make such a machine of stone was far beyond my power, but it had struck me that the vertebrae of the whale might serve my purpose.
I determined next morning to look out a tree from which I might cut the blocks of wood that I should require to raise my crushers.