But even without the meat my food supply was secure to me for a good while onward, there being no less than ten boxes with two dozen tins of beans in each of them--quite enough to keep life in me for more than half a year. I rummaged through the place thoroughly, but found nothing more that was fit to eat there. Some boxes of biscuit and a barrel of flour had gone musty until they fairly were rotten; and all the other things that I came across were spoiled utterly by damp and mould. As for the stores for the crew, when I went forward to have a look at them, they were spoiled too--the flour and biscuit rotten, and the pickled meat a mouldy mass of tough fibre encrusted thickly with salt. One other thing I did find in the captain's pantry that was as good, save for the mould that coated the outside of it, as when it came aboard--and because of its excellent condition was all the more tantalizing. This was a case of plug tobacco--a bit of which shredded and filled into one of the pipes that I found with it, could I have got it lighted, would have made me for the moment almost a happy man. But as I could think of no way of lighting it I was worse off than if I had not found it at all. Having made my tour of inspection and taken a general inventory of my new possessions, I came on deck again and seated myself on the roof of the cabin that I might do some quiet thinking about what should be my next move; for I realized that only by a stroke of rare good fortune had I come upon this supply of food far away from, the coast of my continent, and that should I leave it and keep on the course northward that I had set for myself I very likely might starve before another such store fell in my way. And yet, on the other hand, to stay on where I was merely because I was able to keep alive there--with no outlook of hope to stay me--was but making a bid for that madness which comes of despair. As to carrying any great quantity of food on with me, it was a sheer impossibility. The tins of beans weighed each of them more than five pounds, and a score of them would make as much of a load as I well could carry on level ground--and far more of a load than I could manage in the scramble that was before me if I decided to go on. Indeed, I had found my two bottles of water a serious inconvenience; and yet I would have them to carry also, and the big compass too. As to water, however, since the shower of the morning. I felt less anxiety: and the event proved that my confidence in the rainfall was justified--for the showers came regularly a little after dawn, and only once or twice after that first sharp experience did I feel more than passing pain from thirst.