which had got very lumpy. They shook them and pushed them and pulled them about until they were a little less like half-empty sacks of round Dutch cheeses and a little more like mattresses.
Then Susan started scraping the saucepan and the frying-pan and cleaning the black off them with fine sand. At least, it was not very fine sand, but it was the finest she could get.
“I’m going to leave the kettle just as black as it is,” she said. “It looks fine.”
John spread the sail out flat on the ground, undid the lacings and freed it from the gaff and the boom. He settled down with some fine stuff, thin string, to finish off the ragged reef points with neat splices, cutting the frayed ends away with his knife.
This took a long time, and then he noticed that one of the seams in the sail was giving. An inch or two of stitching had come undone. John went into his tent and rummaged in his box.
“Lucky we brought a sailmaker’s needle,” he said as he came back.
“Luckier if you knew how to use it,” said the mate a moment or two later, when she looked up and saw the captain sucking his thumb.
“Well, it isn’t my fault,” said the captain. “Real sailmakers push the needle through with a lump of leather in the palm of their hand.”
“Let’s have a look,” said the mate.
Between them they made a pretty fair job of the seam. John’s reef points were very good indeed. “If life was only splices,” his father had said the year before, “you would have nothing left to learn.”
With Susan’s help he stretched the sail along the gaff and began to lace it. They were both so intent on this that they saw nothing of a boat that