seemed nothing short of an earthquake could move it; and that was strong enough for us, for against an earthquake, if it came, of course we could do nothing. Having succeeded with our first post, we did not take quite so long about erecting the other three; but it was near six weeks, I should think, before we got all four in position, I mean six weeks after we had felled the trunks, they having then to be pointed with our rude axes, and the scaffolding having to be built up afresh with the same care for the fourth post as for the first. When we had the four posts up we were very well satisfied with our handiwork, but desperately weary, for we had stuck to it day after day without respite except to get our food and perform the other articles of our regular life--bathing, and going up to our watch-tower, as we called it, and so forth. Accordingly I said to Billy that we would take a week's holiday before we made the walls of our house, on which Billy sighed very heavily. "Why, don't you want a holiday?" I asked him. "'Course I do, master," says he, "but how can you have a holiday without any beer?" He then told me that when his father took a holiday, he drove to some country part near London--Islington, or maybe Hampstead--and spent the day in playing skittles and drinking beer. This put a notion into my head, and the first day of our holiday we played skittles with some short posts set up in the sand on the beach, bowling at them with cocoa-nuts. 'Twas as good a sport as we could devise at that time, though we soon came to invent a better, as you shall hear. CHAPTER THE EIGHTH OF MY ENCOUNTER WITH A SEA MONSTER; AND OF THE MEANS WHEREBY WE PROVIDED OURSELVES WITH ARMS I think it was on the second day of our week's holiday that we had a terrible fright, which affected us the more because hitherto there had been so little to alarm us. We had eaten our dinner, and were roaming idly along the high ground in the west of the island, when, looking over the brink, Billy spied some nests among the rocks in the face of the cliff. We had never been able to obtain near so many eggs for our food as we wished, the hens laying their eggs, as I have said, in secret places which required much searching for, and for that we did not on our working days care to spend time. But spying these nests, Billy was set on clambering down to them to see if they contained eggs, which would make us a very good supper.