out of all its pockets. No society lady ever entered her
brand-new marble house at Newport with half the happiness.

Ivy was crazy about the cave and never tired of pointing out its
advantages. She went to house-keeping without any of the utensils, as
keen and eager as she'd gone to it on the poor old _Boldero_, where at
least there were pots and pans and pepper.

We had grub to last a few weeks, a pair of blankets, the clothes we
stood in, and an axe. I had, besides, a heavy clasp-knife, a watch, and
seven sovereigns. The first thing Ivy insisted on was a change of
clothes.

"These we stand in," says she, "are the only presentable things we've
got, and Heaven only knows how long they've got to last us for best."

"We could throw modesty to the winds," I suggested.

"Of course you can do as you please," she said. "I don't care one way or
the other about the modesty; but I've got a skin that looks on the sun
with distinct aversion, and I don't propose to go through a course of
yellow blisters--and then turn black."

"I've seen islanders weave cloth out of palm fibre--most any kind," I
said. "It's clumsy and airy; but if you think it would do----"

"It sounds scratchy."

"It is, but it's good for the circulation."

Well, we made a kind of cloth and cut it into shapes, and knotted the
shapes together with more fibre; then we folded up our best and only
Sunday-go-to-meeting suits and put the fibre things on; and then we went
down to the cove to look at ourselves in the water. And Ivy laughed.

"We're not clothed," she said; "we're thatched; and yet--and yet--it's
accident, of course, but this skirt has got a certain hang that----"

"Whatever that skirt's got," I said, "these pants haven't; but if you're
happy I am."

Well, there's worse situations than desert-islanding it with the one
woman in the world. I even know one man who claims he was cast away with
a perfect stranger that he hated the sight of at first--a terribly
small-minded, conventional woman--and still he had the time of his life.
They got to like each other over a mutual taste for cribbage, which they
played for sea-shells, yellow with a pink edge, until the woman went
broke and got heavily in debt to the man. He was nice about it and let
her off. He says the affair must have ended in matrimony, only she took
a month to think it over; during that month they were picked up and
carried to Honolulu; then they quarrelled and never saw each other
agai