Читать книгу The Blue Lagoon & The Garden of God (Sequel) онлайн

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Dick enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a ten-foot cane sharpened at the end after the fashion of a quill pen.

“Sure, what’s the use of that?” said Mr Button. “You might job it into a fish, but he’d be aff it in two ticks; it’s the barb that holds them.”

Next day the indefatigable one produced the cane amended; he had whittled it down about three feet from the end and on one side, and carved a fairly efficient barb. It was good enough, at all events, to spear a “groper” with, that evening, in the sunset-lit pools of the reef at low tide.

“There aren’t any potatoes here,” said Dick one day, after the second rains.

“We’ve et ’em all months ago,” replied Paddy.

“How do potatoes grow?” enquired Dick.

“Grow, is it? Why, they grow in the ground; and where else would they grow?” He explained the process of potato-planting: cutting them into pieces so that there was an eye in each piece, and so forth. “Having done this,” said Mr Button, “you just chuck the pieces in the ground; their eyes grow, green leaves ‘pop up,’ and then, if you dug the roots up maybe, six months after, you’d find bushels of potatoes in the ground, ones as big as your head, and weeny ones. It’s like a family of childer—some’s big and some’s little. But there they are in the ground, and all you have to do is to take a fark and dig a potful of them with a turn of your wrist, as many a time I’ve done it in the ould days.”