‘’Pears when the ship struck, he’d been jerked off the poop right into this butter barr’l, which was standing open and most empty on the lower deck. When he felt the ship disappearing under him, being an Irishman, and a genius, with a turn for expurriment,--but I guess mainly because he couldn’t swim,--he calculated to stay where he was. He grabbed a bit of wood that came along, and by means of this managed to keep the barr’l top side up, the sea luckily being as ca’m as a mill-pond. He said he was first taken out maybe hundred of miles till he could most smell the Canaries, and then brought in again on the turning tide and washed up. In his struggles near shore, he’d kicked clean through the bottom of the cask, and, getting his leg jammed tight through the hole, was as fast as a tick when we found him. He had a down on butter afterwards; he never ’peared to go much on it, ’slong as I knew him.’ Over Mr Denver’s face, which had hitherto been as unmoved and expressionless as carved mahogany, twinkled a fleeting look of joy, which disappeared with the next puff of his cigar. ‘That was not the most amusing day I _have_ spent,’ he went on, meditatively; ‘we kept mighty busy looking for fixings and finding none to speak of; I guess the current must have appropriated all that was useful in the old tub,--only the most or’nery articles came along--empty hencoops, and barr’ls, and such like--not a single tarnation thing to eat or drink. I judge the skipper and most of the crew turned up their toes, though I heard afterwards that four of them were saved out of a small boat by a passing vessel. Torin got a piece of sail-cloth, and made himself a pinafore, which comforted him some. Kinjan slept most of the day, and when he woke up, he told us we were fools, and that what we wanted instead of mooning around for things from the sea, was to go inland and find out if there weren’t any houses or cities in the vicinity; and then he rolled himself up tight in the shade of that sand-heap like a darned yellow dormouse, and went to sleep again; I guess he must have had a most amazing wide-awake time in that barr’l, I never saw a man sleep so. Torin and I were most powerfully hungry and thirsty by this, so we went inland a piece and looked about us for the highest ground we could find,--the country was as blamed flat, mind you, as this prairie. We found a sand hillock that rose a bit above the rest of the ground, and Torin made a back and said “get up;” so I got, and stood on his shoulders, and looked; and presently out of the distance away to the south-east, it might have been five or six miles, I could see some white spikey things seeming to stick up out of the yallow horizon. I told Torin, and he got up on me, and when he came down--which he did pretty smart, owing to my balance going wrong--he cursed gently, with his mouth full of sand, and said, “Minarets, city!”