I tried first of all a very thin strand of a creeping plant, but though that was tough enough, it was not at all elastic, so that I gave that up at once. Next I bethought me of the fibres in the husks and leaves of the cocoa-nut, and wondered whether these could be woven into a cord; and if any are surprised that I should so much as mention this, having seen cocoa-nuts, perhaps, only as they appear in our shops, I will explain that the nut itself is enclosed in a tough fibrous husk of about two inches in thickness, while the leaf is covered for two or three feet of its length with a fibrous matting, very fine and strong, which acts as a kind of brace to the stalk and keeps it steadily fixed to the trunk. I had taken note of this fibrous substance, and, indeed, thought I remembered that the native people made thread of it; but when I came to the actual experiment, I found that the thread so made was as tough as you please, and it served us excellent well afterward in many ways, as will presently be seen, but it was quite lacking in that spring without which a bow-string is impossible. [Illustration: Spearhead] I do not mean to say that I made all these discoveries while Billy was cooking the supper, but only that I began to make my trials then. It was, indeed, several days before we lighted on something that was suited to our purpose, and that by a kind of accident. We had gone up the mountain, as was our daily custom, to make our survey, and coming down again we left our usual path, for no reason that I can remember, and came upon a patch of plants of a kind that we had not observed before. We had become by this time so knowing in the vegetation of our island, though quite ignorant of the names of the plants, that we stopped to examine this new kind, and plucked some of it, which we peeled as we went our way. It seemed to me that the bark of it had a certain stretch in its fibres, and when we got back to our hut we pulled the fibres out and twisted some of them together in the manner of a cord, and fastened the ends of the string thus made to the ends of a short pliable twig, and to our great joy, when I pulled the string and released it suddenly, it shot back with a twang as like that of a true cord as can be imagined. In my delight I cried out that I would be Robin Hood and Billy should be Little John, which he took at first to be an affront on his shortness of stature, he being eight inches or more less than I was at that time; he grew afterwards till there was no more than four inches betwixt us. But on my telling him what stories I could remember of Robin Hood and his bold men in Lincoln green--Friar Tuck and Maid Marion and the rest of the company--Billy, who had never heard of any of these before, was greatly delighted, though he doubted whether they were quite so good marksmen as the stories said, and professed that of them all he would have preferred to be Friar Tuck,