My preliminary investigations being thus well ended, and the morning ended too, I piped all hands to dinner; that is to say, I whistled to my cat--who had been sitting still and watching me pretty solemnly, his friskiness being for the time taken out of him by the pain in his paw--and when he perceived that I was paying some attention to him again he came limping to me on his three good legs and said with a miau that if I pleased he would prefer going to his dinner in my arms. And when I picked him up--as, indeed, I had to, for he positively insisted upon my carrying him--he forgot about his hurt and fell to purring to me at a great rate and to making little gentle thrusts against my arm with the fore paw that was sound. And so we went aft in great friendship and contentment and had a gay dinner together: the cat sitting on the table opposite to me with all possible decorum--but manifesting his daintiness by refusing to eat anything but tinned chicken, and only the white meat at that! XXXIV I END A GOOD JOB WELL, AND GET A SET-BACK When my meal was finished I set myself first of all to getting off the hatch beneath which my boat lay; and this proved to be a bigger job than I had counted upon--each of its sections being so heavy that I could not manage it without tackle, and even with tackle the work took me a good hour. My plan of operations had included removing the hatch every morning and setting it back again every night, but when I found how much energy and time would be wasted in that way I changed my front a little and got at the same result along another line. All that I needed was a covering for the hatch that would keep the rain out; and what I did, therefore, was to knock together a light grating of wood to fit over it--sloping the grating downward on each side from a sort of a ridge pole--on which a tarpaulin could be stretched; and in that way I got shortly to a water-tight covering for my hatch that I could shift back and forth quickly and without any trouble at all. But the whole of what remained of the afternoon was spent in getting that piece of preliminary work finished to my mind. The next morning I set myself to the examination of the stuff stowed in the boat--the several parts which I would have to put together in order to make my craft ready for the sea--and for this job also a great deal of preliminary arrangement was required. Many of the pieces--as the boiler, the cylinder, the shaft, the screw, and the sections of the cabin--were too heavy for me to lift without tackle; and as they all had to be got out and arranged in order ready for use, and then in due course put aboard the boat one at a time in their proper places, I first of all had to set up some sort of lifting apparatus to take the place of a crane.