In process of time Carteret was finished; it was then begun a second time, and once more read through. After that Adams felt a chill feeling of helplessness steal over him, for Carteret could not be read over and over again like the Bible, and he could not quite see his way to reading the Church of England prayers by way of recreation. In his extremity he had recourse to Sally for advice. Indeed, now that Sall was approaching young womanhood, not only the children but all the grown people of the island, including their chief or “father,” found themselves when in trouble gravitating, as if by instinct, to the sympathetic heart and the ready hand.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” said Sally, when appealed to, as she took the seaman’s rough hand and fondled it; “just try to invent stories, and tell them to us as if you was readin’ a book. You might even turn Carteret upside down and pretend that you was readin’.”
Adams shook his head.
“I never could invent anything, Sall, ’xcept w’en I was tellin’ lies, an’ that’s a long while ago now—a long, long while. No; I doubt that I couldn’t invent, but I’ll tell ’ee what; I’ll try to remember some old yarns, and spin them off as well as I can.”
The new idea broke on Adams’s mind so suddenly that his eyes sparkled, and he bestowed a nautical slap on his thigh.
“The very thing!” cried Sally, whose eyes sparkled fully more than those of the sailor, while she clapped her hands; “nothing could be better. What will you begin with?”
“Let me see,” said Adams, seating himself on a tree-stump, and knitting his brows with a severe strain of memory. “There’s Cinderella; an’ there’s Ally Babby or the fifty thieves—if it wasn’t forty—I’m not rightly sure which, but it don’t much matter; an’ there’s Jack the Giant-killer, an’ Jack and the Pea-stalk—no; let me see; it was a beanstalk, I think—anyhow, it was the stalk of a vegetable o’ some sort. Why, I wonder it never struck me before to tell you all about them tales.”
Reader, if you had seen the joy depicted on Sally’s face, and the rich flush of her cheek, and her half-open mouth with its double row of pearls, while Adams ran over this familiar list, you would have thought it well worth that seaman’s while to tax his memory even more severely than he did.
“And then,” he continued, knitting his brows still more severely, “there’s Gulliver an’ the Lillycups or putts, an’ the Pilgrim’s Progress—though, of course, I don’t mean for to say I knows ’em all right off by heart, but that’s no odds. An’ there’s Robinson Crusoe—ha! that’s the story for you, Sall; that’s the tale that’ll make your hair stand on end, an’ a’most split your sides open, an’ cause the very marrow in your spine to wriggle. Yes; we’ll begin with Robinson Crusoe.”
Having settled this point to their mutual and entire satisfaction, the two went off for a short walk before supper. On the way, they met Elizabeth Mills and Mary Christian, both of whom were now no longer staggerers, but far advanced as jumpers. They led between them Adams’s little daughter Dinah, who, being still very small, could not take long walks without assistance and an occasional carry.