hat
which we had made for the days of the week; and thus you see we had now
got an almanac among other things.

"'And now,' said the Dean, 'let us put all this down for fear we forget
it.' So away the little fellow ran and gathered a great quantity of
small pebbles, and these we arranged on the top of the rock so as to
form letters; and the letters that we thus made spelled out

'JOHN HARDY AND RICHARD DEAN,
CAST AWAY IN THE COLD,
TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 1824.'

"Now, when we came to look ahead, and to speculate upon what was likely
to befall us, we saw that we had two months of summer still remaining;
and, as midsummer had hardly come yet, we knew that we were likely to
have it warmer than before, and we had now no further fears about being
able to live through that period. In these two months it was plain that
one of two things must happen,--a ship must come along and take us off,
or we must be prepared for the dark time that must follow after the sun
should go down for the winter; otherwise a third thing would certainly
happen, that is, we should both die,--an event which did not, in any
case, seem at all unlikely; so we pledged ourselves to stand by each
other through every fortune, each helping the other all he could. At any
rate, we would not lose hope, and never despair of being saved, through
the mercy of Providence, somehow or other.

"Having reached this resigned state of mind, we were ready to consider
rationally what we had to do. It was clear enough that, if we only
looked out for a ship to save us, and that chance should in the end
fail, we would be ill prepared for the winter if we were left on the
island to encounter its perils. Therefore it was necessary to be ready
for the worst, and accordingly, after a little deliberation, we
concluded to proceed as follows:--

"1st. We would construct a place to shelter ourselves from the cold and
storms. (In this we had made some satisfactory progress already.)

"2d. We would collect all the food we could while there was opportunity.

"3d. We would gather fuel, of which, as had been already proved, there
was Andromeda (or fire-plant) and moss and blubber to depend upon. Of
this latter the dead narwhal and seal would furnish us a moderate
supply; but for the rest we must rely upon our own skill to capture some
other animals from the sea; though, as to how this was to be done, we
had to own ourselves comple