"Be ready to use the boat-hook, or the anchor, if the seals attack us. I’ll use one of the oars." "I don’t believe we’ll have to fight at all," cried Sam. "Look ’ee! There be they two young seals swimmin’ out to find the old uns. They bean’t so young as you thought if they can swim like that, and we med as well have took ’em yesterday as not." "Well, ’tis too late now. They’re gone." "To get their supper, I reckon. I be mortal hungry, Maister Dick, arter all that work. Have ’ee got a morsel of bread in yer pocket?" "Not a bit." "Not a apple or codling?" "Not one." "I could eat a turmit or a raw tater. But don’t name ’em to me, or I shall feel very bad for thinkin’ of ’em. Best thing is to go to sleep when yer hungry, ’cos you don’t feel it then." "Well, sleep. I’ll wake you if anything happens." The boy curled himself up in the bottom of the boat, and soon filled the cavern with his snores. CHAPTER THE FIFTH St. Cuby’s Well To see another eat when oneself is hungry, or sleep when oneself is wakeful, is surely very trying to the temper, except to those happily-constituted individuals who are incapable of envy. Dick Trevanion was as generous-hearted a boy as you could wish; but as the time went by, unmarked by anything but the slow rise of the boat and the quick dwindling of the candle in the lantern, he looked at Sam’s open mouth with impatience, listened to his untuneful solo with dislike, and felt a deplorable desire to kick him. He had no watch, and bethought himself that it might be as well, when he got home, to test the duration of a candle, so that if he were ever in such a predicament again he might at least have a clock of King Alfred’s sort. Every now and then he snuffed the coarse wick, and when the tallow had sunk almost to the socket, he substituted another candle-end that he happened to have in his pocket. Beyond this he had nothing to employ him. But by-and-by, as the roof of the vault came nearer to him with the gradual lifting of the boat, an idea struck him. Why not use the boat as a raised platform for the ladder, and so contrive to examine an additional ten or twelve feet of the walls? The ladder!—it was floating on the surface of the water, heaving simultaneously with the boat as the tide gently rippled in. "Wake up, Sam!" he called. Sam snored on. "Wake up!" cried Dick again, leaning over and pinching the sleeper’s nose. Sam struck out with his fist, as any honest English boy would have done, without opening his eyes. But at a third call he roused himself, sat up, and rubbing those heavy organs vigorously, sighed like a furnace, and then said sleepily: "Why, where be I?" "In dreamland, I should think," replied Dick, laughing. "Wake up! I want you to hold the ladder against the wall while I climb again." "In twelve feet o’ water! Not me; I bean’t growed enough for that. ’Tis work for a giant."