Ed’s books were a good deal in demand at this time. Irv and Phil managed to do some swimming in spite of the drift-wood and the coldness of the water. For the rest, the boys lounged about on the deck, with now and then a “long talk” at the scuttle or in the cabin if it rained. Their “long talks” on deck were always held around the scuttle, so that the one on guard over Hughes might take part in them. There were only five steps to the little ladder that led from deck to cabin, and by sitting on the middle one the boy on guard could keep his feet on the edge of the prisoner’s bunk and let his head protrude above the deck. They had naturally been thinking a good deal about what Ed had told them concerning food, and now and then a question would arise in the mind of one or another of them which would set the conversation going again. “I wonder,” said Will Moreraud, “how men first found out what things were good to eat?” “By trying them, I guess,” said Phil. “I read in a book somewhere that whenever the primitive man saw a new beast he asked first, ‘can he eat me?’ and next, ‘can I eat him?’” “Yes,” said Ed, “and that sort of thing continued until our own time, when science came in to help us. You know where the jimson weed got its name, don’t you?” None of them had ever heard. “Well, ‘jimson’ is only a corruption of ‘Jamestown.’ When the early settlers landed at Jamestown they found so many new kinds of grain, and animals, and plants that they began trying them to see which were good and which were not. Among other things they thought the burs of the jimson weed--the poisonous thorn-apple of stramonium--looked rather inviting. So they boiled a lot of the burs and ate them. Like idiots, they didn’t confine the experiment to one man, or better still ‘try it on a dog,’ but set to work, a lot of them at once, to eat the stuff. It poisoned them, of course, and made a great sensation in Jamestown. So they named the plant the Jamestown weed.” “I remember,” said Irv, “my grandfather telling me that when he was young, people thought tomatoes were poisonous, and he said it took a long time for those that tried them to teach other people better.” “That’s what I had in my mind,” said Ed, “when I said that there was no known way to find out whether things were good to eat or not except by trying them, till modern science came to our aid.” “How does modern science manage it?” asked Will.