“But take your bath, boys, and don’t hurry it up. We have plenty of time.”
“Gee, I wish we had some soap.”
“Soap, why certainly; I think we can find plenty of it around here, and so saying the Professor began a search along the stream, and as his eyes lighted on a shrub with long dagger-shaped leaves, broke off a number of the branches which carried at the top of each stem a large cluster of reddish brown berries.
“We ate some of those on one occasion and were poisoned.”
“They are poisonous, but not dangerously so.”
“What do you do with them?”
“Simply mash them up; see how easily they saponify, and make suds.”
“And here we have been all this time without knowing anything about them.”
“Of course water is always necessary in using them,” and the Professor laughed, as did the boys also, at the recollection that they had no water for bathing purposes for six months.
“Why it grows all over the island wherever we have been.”