I own I could give him no answer except that my gorge rose at the thought of it, and this led me to consider of the strange inconsistencies of men in matters of food, as in other things. My aunt Susan would have been aghast at the idea of eating a snail, but she would eat a chicken which she had herself fed on snails; and when I mentioned this, Billy said that he didn't see any difference between eating a chicken full of snails and the snails themselves. "Billy," said I presently, "I never thought I should see you eating worms." "Why, whenever did you see me do that, master?" says he; "I never done it. I'd be sick." "But we had a chicken for dinner, and you may be sure it had eaten worms," I said. He began to see what I was driving at, and looked very grave for some minutes, as if endeavouring to probe the comparison. Then a broad grin spread over his face, and he said, "I reckon the chicken eats worms for the same reason as we eat chickens, 'cause they're nice," and I am sure he believed he had solved a very knotty problem. [Sidenote: A Canoe] It was partly this adventure with the shark, and partly our natural wish to circumnavigate the island, that set us on trying to make a boat. We had many times been sorry that we did not think of securing the boat of the _Lovey Susan_ which had been staved in on the beach, and therefore abandoned by the seamen, but which we might perhaps have patched up if we had hauled it away from the sea. Unhappily, neither Billy nor I had the least knowledge how to build a boat, nor if we had would our rude tools have availed us much, so that though the idea had come into our heads more than once, we had never done anything towards putting it in action, partly from this ignorance of ours, and partly because we had been so much occupied with other matters. Now that the notion had come back to us with more force, however, we determined to see what we could do in digging out the trunk of a tree to make a canoe, something like those we had seen from our look-out hill, though not near so large. Since we required it only to hold two, there was no reason to make it large, whereas there were many for making it small, for a large one would have needed a terrible amount of work, and if we could have made one, we might have had great difficulty in bringing it down to the beach and then in launching it. Yet we resolved that, though it should not be large compared with those that held twenty or thirty men, it should be of such a size as to ride the sea with fair stability, for we did not want a cockle-shell or any cranky thing.