"But we've brought you a present," called Tandy, leaning far over the taffrail, "a vegetable vine that will keep you supplied with fresh vegetables as long as we're at sea. SEE! DEEEE Aye DEE OH!" "Avast and balaydeeaye!" barked Samuel Salt grimly. "Let's get away from here. This is no way for able-bodied seamen to talk." Rushing from wheel to mast, he quickly set his sail. "Ahoy! Ahoy Dee Oy Dee OH!" he yodelled, then, very red in the face, he blew three shrill blasts on his fog horn, swung his ship about and the _Crescent Moon_, with a spanking breeze on her quarter, went skimming away toward the southern skyline. CHAPTER 12 Fog The evening had blown up raw and cold, and after carrying an old tarpaulin down to cover Nikobo, Tandy had come shivering back to the main cabin. Samuel Salt had close reefed his topsails and double reefed his courses, adjusted his mechanical steering gear, and now sat beside the fire examining a heap of the glittering crystals from Alberif's island. "Just sketch Peakenspire Island on the chart, there where I've made the cross," he directed, looking up with an absent smile as the little boy came over to warm himself at the cheerful blaze. "You're such a hand with a brush, even in so small a place you can give a good idea of the City of Bridges." "And a good idea they are," murmured Ato, who was busy mending his fishing nets on the other side of the fireplace. "In every port we learn something new, eh, Mate? All mountains, no matter how high and peaked, could be lived on if they were properly bridged." "True, quite true," agreed Samuel, squinting contentedly through his magnifying glass, while Tandy began sketching in the latest discovery on the sea chart. "I've written it all up in my journal and put down Peakenspire Island as able to accommodate a thousand settlers from Oz and as an especially good place for poets." "Provided they are deaf," put in Ato, looking comically over his specs, "AYE DEE AYE DEE OH! While you fellows were aloft I got to yodeling so fast and furious I blew all the sauce pans off their hooks." "Yes, that _is_ one disadvantage," admitted Samuel, glancing approvingly at Tandy's picture of Alberif's Island, "but never mind, we don't have to live there, and think of the splendid specimens we've brought away, Mates!" Samuel ran his fingers lovingly through the heap of crystals and strands of metal Alberif had given him. "And those fruit and vegetable vines will provision us for the whole voyage." "They're a great comfort to _me_, I assure you," muttered Ato, holding up his net to the light to see whether there were any more holes. "Now I know Kobo will never starve. I put a vegetable vine in a box on her raft and that leaves two for us, two for Ozma, and maybe Tandy would like to take the other two home with him?"