greatly uplifted at this, and wanted to set off there and then on a voyage; he even said that perhaps we might rig up a sail and voyage to England; but I told him that we had not yet proved the vessel, and did not even know whether she would ride through a sea of any roughness; and as for England, it was impossible to think that we could ever cross the immense ocean in so clumsy a craft, though the mention of it set me a-longing, and I felt more miserable than I had done for many a day. We had not yet made any paddles for propelling our canoe; Billy very sensibly saying that 'twas no good wasting time on them until we had proved whether our vessel would float. However, now that we were assured of this, we made some paddles, finding it a pretty hard job, for we had no means of splitting planks from the trees, and we had to content ourselves with short poles, with blades made in the following manner. To one end of the pole we lashed a thin flexible rod, bent to the shape of a circle, and we made a kind of basket-work on this by crossing and re-crossing with threads of cocoa-nut fibre, which we drew as tight as we could. When we had coloured it red with the sap of the redwood tree of which I have spoken before, we had a very serviceable paddle, and not ill-looking either. We paddled about in shallow water near the sandy beach, not venturing to go further out as yet, from fear of capsizing where we might be snapped up by a shark. Our vessel behaved very well, though with no grace of movement, to be sure, and we found after a little practice that we could sit on the crosspieces of the outrigger, which joined the sides of the canoe, and work our paddles very well. I asked Billy what we should call our vessel. "Blackamoor, that's what I say," said he. "But she's only black inside," said I; "her outside is fair enough; and now I come to think of it, we can paint her and make her look better still." [Sidenote: Naming the Vessel] Accordingly we did this, expressing oil from the candle-nuts of which I have spoken, and mixing this with sap from the red-wood tree. We made a paintbrush of thin spines, and with this we painted the sides of the vessel, which took us above a fortnight, I should think, for it was wonderful what a prodigious quantity of paint we used, and what a prodigious number of nuts we pressed before we got enough oil for our purpose. When the painting was finished, Billy said that we ought to call the vessel _Painted Sally_, or some such name; but I thought she deserved a more respectful appellation, and suggested _Esperanza_, a name which I had come upon somewhere in my reading, and which I thought had a pleasant sound. However, Billy would not hear of it. "It's French, that I warrant you," he said, "and I can't abide 'em. Besides, what's it mean? I suppose it means some rubbish or other." "Well, I think it means 'hope'," I said, "and I think it a much prettier word." "I don't," says Billy bluntly; "it's too soft like."