Boys -- Juvenile fiction; England -- Juvenile fiction
He thought Mark was a very long time gone; he got up and walked round
the huge trunk of the sycamore, and looked up into it to see if any
immense boa-constrictor was coiled among its great limbs. He thought
they would some day build a hut up there on a platform of poles. Far
out over the water he saw the Unknown Island, and remembered that when
they sailed there in the ship there was no knowing what monsters or what
enchantments they might encounter. So he walked out from the trees into
the field to look for some moly to take with them, and resist Circe.
The bird’s-foot lotus he knew was not it. There was one blue spot of
veronica still, and another tiny blue flower which he did not know,
besides the white honeysuckle clover at which the grey bees were busy,
and would scarce stir from under his footsteps. He found three button
mushrooms, and put them in his pocket. Wandering on among the buttercup
stalks and bunches of grass, like a butterfly drawn hither and thither
by every speck of colour, he came to a little white flower on a slender
stem a few inches high, which he gathered for moly. Putting the
precious flower--good against sorcery--in his breast-pocket for safety,
he rose from his knees, and saw Mark coming by the sycamores.
Mark was hot and tired with running, yet he had snatched time enough to
bring four cherries for Bevis. He had the burning-glass--a lens
unscrewed from the telescope, and sitting on the grass they focussed the
sun’s rays on a piece of paper. The lens was powerful and the summer
sun bright, so that in a few seconds there was a tiny black speck, then
the faintest whiff of bluish smoke, then a leap of flame, and soon
another, till the paper burned, and their fire was lit. As the little
hut blazed up they put some more boughs on, and the dead leaves attached
to them sent up a thin column of smoke.
“The savages will see that,” said Mark, “and come swarming down from the
hills.”
“We ought to have made the fire in a hole,” said Bevis, “and put turf on
it.”
“What ever shall we do?” said Mark. “They’ll be here in a minute.”
“Fetich,” said Bevis. “I know, cut that stick sharp at the end, tie a
handful of grass on it--be quick--and run down towards the elms and
stick it up. Then they’ll think we’re doing fetich, and won’t come any
nearer.”
“First-rate,” said Mark, and off he went with the stick, and thrust it
into the sward with a wisp of grass tied to the top. Bevis piled on the
branches, and when he came back there was a large fire. Then the
difficulty was how to cook the bird? If they put it on the ashes, it
would burn and be spoiled; if they hung it up, they could not make it
twist round and round, and they had no iron pot to boil it; or
earthenware pot to drop red-hot stones in, and so heat the water without
destroying the vessel. The only thing they could do was to stick it on
a stick, and hold it to the fire till it was roasted, one side at a
time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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