will make next?"

"A lamp!" says I.

"How, Martin?"

"With a shell, the fat of our goat rendered down, and cotton from my
shirt."

"Nay, if you so yearn for a lamp I can do this much."

"Good!" says I, rising. "Meantime I'll turn carpenter and to begin
with, try my hand at a stool for you."

"But if you have no saw, Martin--?"

"I will make me a chisel instead." Crossing to the fire I found my
iron red-hot, and taking it betwixt two flat pieces of wood that served
me for tongs I laid it upon my stone anvil, and fell forthwith to
beating and shaping it with the hammer-back of my hatchet until I had
beaten out a blade some two inches wide. Having cooled my chisel in the
brook I betook me to sharpening it on a stone moistened with water, and
soon had wrought it to a good edge. I now selected from my timber a
board sufficiently wide, and laying this on my anvil-stone began to cut
a piece from the plank with hammer and chisel, the which I found a work
requiring great care, lest I split my wood, and patience, since my
chisel, being of iron, needed much and repeated grinding. Howbeit it
was done at last, and the result of my labour a piece of wood about two
feet square, and behold the seat of my stool!

Now was my companion idle for, while all this is a-doing, she sets the
turtle-shell on the fire with water and collops of meat cut with my
knife, and, soon as it simmers, breaks into it divers herbs she had
dried in the sun; and so comes to watch and question me at my work, yet
turning, ever and anon, to stir at the stew with her new spoon, whereby
I soon began to snuff a savour methought right appetising. As time
passed, this savour grew ever more inviting and my hunger with it, my
mouth a-watering so that I might scarce endure, as I told her to her no
small pleasure.

"Had I but a handful of salt, Martin!" sighs she.

"Why, comrade," says I, pausing 'twixt two hammer-strokes, "Wherefore
this despond? If you can make stew so savoury and with nought but
flesh of an old goat and a few dried herbs, what matter for salt?" At
this she laughed and bent to stir at her stew again.

"There's plenty of salt in the sea yonder," says she presently.

"True, but how to come at it?"

"How if we boiled sea-water, Martin?"

"'Tis method unknown to me," says I, whittling at a leg of my stool,
"but we can try."

And now in the seat of my stool I burned three good-sized holes or
sockets, and having trimmed three lengths