As well as I could make out from what I found on board of her--for her papers either had been carried away or were stowed in some place which I did not discover--the _Ville de Saint Remy_ had been bound outward to some colonial port and carried a cargo of general stores. When I got her hatches off--though that came later--I saw in one place a lot of wheelbarrows, and some heavy wagons stowed with their wheels inside of them, and some machinery for threshing along with a portable steam-engine; and in another place were boxes which seemed to have dry-goods in them, and a great many cases of wines, and some very big cases that evidently contained pianos--and so on with a great lot of stuff such as the people of a flourishing colony would be likely to need. But in my round that morning with the cat on my shoulders--for he was not content to remain perched on one of them quietly, but kept passing from one to the other with affectionate rubs against the back of my head, and all the while purring as hard as he could purr--I did not get below the main-deck except into the engine-room, my attention being given to finding out fully what the steamer had on board of her in the way of work-shops and tools: for already, with my renewed cheerfulness, the notion was beginning to take hold of me that I might set to work and build a boat for myself--and so make what I could not find. And, indeed, I don't doubt that I should have set myself to this big undertaking--for the appointments of the vessel were admirably complete and everything that I wanted for my work was there--had not a bigger, but a more promising, undertaking presented itself to me and so turned my efforts into another way. XXXIII I MAKE A GLAD DISCOVERY It was directly to my cat that I owed the great piece of good fortune that then came to me: but I must confess that he was an unwilling agent in the matter, and probably wished himself well out of it, the immediate result in his case being rather a bad squeeze to one of his fore paws. We had been examining the machine-shop, the cat and I, and whatever his views about it may have been mine were of great satisfaction; for when I had got the dead-lights unscrewed so that I could see well about me I had been delighted by finding there everything that my boat-building project required. Indeed, I almost fancied myself back again in one of the work-shops of the Stevens Institute, so well was the place fitted and supplied--a completeness probably due to the fact that the _Ville de Saint Remy_ was intended for long voyages to out-of-the-way ports, and very well might have to depend upon her own resources for important repairs.