"Oh, don't you fidget about me, Mr Jack, I'm getting on glorious," said the man quietly. "I feel as if the sun and wind up here were doing me no end of good, drinking 'em in like. Doctor said I was to take it coolly; so coolly I take it, as the sun 'll let me, so as to get strong again as soon as I can. But, my word, what a place it is!" "Lovely," said Jack. "It grows upon one." "Ah, I should like to grow upon it," said Ned, grinning. "I don't feel as if I should like to go away again." "There's no place like home, Ned," said Jack, who had stopped to watch a pair of vivid sun-birds probing the tiny trumpet blossoms of a white creeper with their beaks. "They say so, sir; but I say there's no place like this. When are we going right up to the top?" "When you are quite well, Ned. We should have started before now, but I asked my father to put it off till you were strong enough to carry my gun and wallet." Ned said nothing, but he looked as if he thought a great deal, and when he next spoke as they went on mounting the gully, it was directly after the doctor had added a lovely kingfisher to the bag. "I say, Mr Jack, sir, of course the doctor knows a deal, but do you think he is always right?" "I suppose no one is always right, Ned. Why?" "About that bird--bird he shot. He said it was a kingfisher." "Well, so it is. You heard him explain about its habits?" "Yes; and that's what bothers me. How can it be a kingfisher if it don't fish?" "You might just as well say, how can it be a kingfisher if it don't fish for kings." "No, I mightn't, sir," replied Ned, whose illness seemed to have developed a kind of argumentative obstinacy. "Nobody nor nothing does fish for kings, sir, so that's nonsense. But what I say is, how can that bird be a kingfisher if it don't fish?" "But it does fish." "No, it don't, sir; it flits about and catches butterflies, and moths, and beetles. Doctor said it never caught fish at all, and never dived down into the water. So what I say is, that it can't be a kingfisher." "Well, but Doctor Instow says that far away back in the past its ancestors must have lived on fish; and then the land where they were changed, till perhaps it was one like this, with plenty of beautiful little rivers in it, but few fish, and so they had to take to living upon insects, which they capture on the wing, and they have gone on doing so ever since." "Seems rum," said Ned thoughtfully. "Then I suppose if this island was to change, so that there were no more butterflies, moths, or beadles, and more fish took to living in the rivers--they'd take to fishing again?" "Yes, I suppose so; all things adapt themselves to circumstances." "Do they now, sir?" "Yes; but you don't know what I mean." "No, sir, I'm blessed if I do." "How stupid! why don't you ask then?" "'Cause I don't want to bother you, sir, when you're getting tired."