The Cook longed for social intercourse in this real Acadia, but he doubted the ability of his French to see him through; fortunately he espied a shop, and therein he purchased sundry sticks of candy; with one of these gravitating between his fingers and lips, he strolled about, and within five minutes he had enchained in sweet bonds several lapsful of dark-eyed children whose pure intuitions taught them that in the great human search for sweetness and light it was never well to decline a proffered half of the desirable whole. When the Purser drew near, it was with a sketchbook loaded with drawings of odd boats which had been passed at their moorings; and the names of these, with those of their owners, which were painted in antique letters astern, would have been of inestimable value to any writer of a French romance. And he brought something dearer yet to the eyes and heart of the Cook, and yet not wholly unpicturesque, it being a pair of cockerels, handsomely spangled, which he had purchased of a thrifty dame with whom he had exchanged some courteous words as he lounged past her riparian laundry in his boat. The Cook hastily took to his boat, distanced the Commodore and Vice, and an hour later announced broiled chickens for dinner, the gridiron having been a few feet of stout wire, which after use could be crumpled together into a thin handful of old iron, yet extended, at need, to a two-chicken capacity. After the expedition had dined, each member discovered, upon arising, that the human side is not destitute of muscles, and that a steady strain of half a day at rudder and paddle, can search these out in a manner as uncomfortable as it is thorough. The Purser, who usually made himself conspicuous, when ashore, by a broad red woolen sash, apparently a muffler such as small boys wear upon their necks in winter, was by far the most agile of the party, and his companions, as they rubbed away the stitches in their sides, inwardly vowed that the picturesque was not always ridiculously useless, particularly when assumed on proper occasions, instead of being treated as of constant utility.