“Well, no,” replied Mr. Crusoe, “I can’t really say they are.”
“Then,” said I, “you see we haven’t found the kind of stakes that your grandfather used, for if we had they’d have sprouted months ago.”
“That’s so,” said Mr. Crusoe, in a gloomy sort of way.
“Then we might as well give up building a fence. We’ve got a house now that nobody can get into, and what we want to do is to cut down the trees and bushes around the house, so that the hannibals can’t hide in them and shoot at us,” I said.
“Cannibals, boy; not hannibals,” exclaimed Mr. Crusoe.
“All right, then,” I answered; “call them anything you choose, and I’ll cut the trees down.”
I was surprised that he didn’t make some objection to cutting the trees down; but that was just his way. You never could tell beforehand whether he would be angry or pleased at anything you might propose.
However, I was very glad that I had got him out of the notion of building a fence; and it’s my belief that his grandfather’s yarn about fence-posts that sprouted was a regular twister. No man ever saw fence-posts growing, I don’t care whose grandfather he was.
Mr. Crusoe helped me cut down the trees, and I will say for him that there wasn’t a lazy bone in his whole body. One day when he was resting, and feeling of the edge of his axe, he said,
“Mike, I told you long ago that it was all wrong for yon to be here. When members of my family are shipwrecked they are always the only people saved. Now I ought to have come ashore alone, and you ought to have been drowned. You must see that.”