Meanwhile, Emmeline, under his directions, had not been idle.
There were in the lagoon--there are in several other tropical lagoons I know of--a fish which I can only describe as a golden herring. A bronze herring it looks when landed, but when swimming away down against the background of coral brains and white sand patches, it has the sheen of burnished gold. It is as good to eat as to look at, and Emmeline was carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.
The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were accidents at times, when a whole fish would go into the fire, amidst shouts of derision from Dick.
She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the "skirt" round the waist looking not unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent, and filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips puckered out at the heat of the fire.
"It's so hot!" she cried in self-defence, after the first of the accidents.
"Of course it's hot," said Dick, "if you stick to looward of the fire.
How often has Paddy told you to keep to windward of it!"
"I don't know which is which," confessed the unfortunate Emmeline, who was an absolute failure at everything practical: who could neither row nor fish, nor throw a stone, and who, though they had now been on the island twenty-eight months or so, could not even swim.
"You mean to say," said Dick, "that you don't know where the wind comes from?"
"Yes, I know that."
"Well, that's to windward."
"I didn't know that."
"Well, you know it now."
"Yes, I know it now."
"Well, then, come to windward of the fire. Why didn't you ask the meaning of it before?"
"I did," said Emmeline; "I asked Mr Button one day, and he told me a lot about it. He said if he was to spit to windward and a person was to stand to loo'ard of him, he'd be a fool; and he said if a ship went too much to loo'ard she went on the rocks, but I didn't understand what he meant. Dicky, I wonder where he is?"
"Paddy!" cried Dick, pausing in the act of splitting open a breadfruit.
Echoes came from amidst the cocoa-nut trees, but nothing more.
"Come on," said Dick; "I'm not going to wait for him. He may have gone to fetch up the night lines"--they sometimes put down night lines in the lagoon--"and fallen asleep over them."