After a while, as time went on, Mr. Button took to his lessons as a matter of course, the small inventions of the children assisting their utterly untrustworthy knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any other there amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky.

Days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months, without the appearance of a ship—a fact which gave Mr. Button very little trouble; and even less to his charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about ships.

The rainy season came on them with a rush, and at the words “rainy season” do not conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy day in Manchester.

The rainy season here was quite a lively time. Torrential showers followed by bursts of sunshine, rainbows, and rain-dogs in the sky, and the delicious perfume of all manner of growing things on the earth.

After the rains the old sailor said he’d be after making a house of bamboos before the next rains came on them; but, maybe, before that they’d be off the island.

“However,” said he, “I’ll dra’ you a picture of what it’ll be like when it’s up”; and on the sand he drew a figure like this:

Having thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a cocoa-palm and lit his pipe. But he had reckoned without Dick.

The boy had not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen desire to see one built, and help to build one. The ingenuity which is part of the multiform basis of the American nature was aroused.

“How’re you going to keep them from slipping, if you tie them together like that?” he asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method.

“Which from slippin’?”

“The canes—one from the other?”

“After you’ve fixed thim, one cross t’other, you drive a nail through the cross-piece and a rope over all.”

“Have you any nails, Paddy?”

“No,” said Mr. Button, “I haven’t.”

“Then how’re you goin’ to build the house?”

“Ax me no questions now; I want to smoke me pipe.”

But he had raised a devil difficult to lay. Morning, noon, and night it was “Paddy, when are you going to begin the house?” or, “Paddy, I guess I’ve got a way to make the canes stick together without nailing.” Till Mr. Button, in despair, like a beaver, began to build.

There was great cane-cutting in the canebrake above, and, when sufficient had been procured, Mr. Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster.

The tireless Dick, young and active, with no original laziness in his composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted to build a house.