Man Friday opened up the fire, and put sticks on it, and soon had it blazing up round the big kettle. She peeled some potatoes, and set them to boil in a saucepan at the edge of the fire. She chopped up the pemmican into very little bits like mince. Then, when the potatoes were soft, she took them out of the water, and broke them up, and mixed them with the chopped meat and made half a dozen round flat cakes of pemmican and potato. Then she put some butter in the frying-pan and melted it, and then she fried the pemmican cakes till they sizzled and bubbled all over them. Robinson Crusoe made the tea.
When they had eaten their meal, which was a very good one, Robinson Crusoe said, “Now, Man Friday, would you mind telling me some of your life before you came to this island?”
Man Friday began at once by telling how she had nearly been eaten by savages, and had only escaped by jumping out of the stew-pot at the last minute.
“Weren’t you scalded?” said Robinson Crusoe.
“Badly,” said Man Friday, “but I buttered the places that hurt most.”
And then Man Friday forgot about being Man Friday, and became mother again, and told about her own childhood on a sheep station in Australia, and about emus that laid eggs as big as a baby’s head, and opossums that ran about with their young ones in a pocket in their fronts, and about kangaroos that could kill a man with a kick, and about snakes that hid in the dust. Here Robinson Crusoe, who had forgotten that she was Robinson Crusoe, and had turned into Titty again, talked about the snake that she had seen herself in the cigar-box that was kept in the charcoal-burners’ wigwam. Then she told mother about the dipper, and how it had bobbed at her, and flown under water. Then mother talked about the great drought on the sheep stations, when there was no rain and no water in the wells, and the flocks had to be driven miles and