“Do let me have the telescope,” said Titty. John gave it her, and she stared through it.
“Mother is a native too,” she said at last.
“Let me have it,” said Roger.
He fixed the telescope to his eye, and pointed it the right way.
“I can’t see anything at all,” he said. “It’s all black.”
“You’ve got the cover over the eye-place,” said Titty, who knew all about telescopes. “Twist it round, and it’ll come open again.”
“I can see them now,” said Roger.
The native, who was Mr. Jackson from the Holly Howe Farm, was rowing his boat with long steady strokes. It looked like a water spider far away. But through the telescope it was easy to see that it was a boat, and to see the big lumps of the haybags and to see that mother was sitting in the stern.
Roger and Titty took turns with the telescope as the boat came nearer. The captain and the mate went down to the camp to make sure that everything was ready to show the visitors. The captain put his tin box, the big one, against the back of his tent in the middle. He took the little barometer out of it and hung it on the fastener in front of the box. There was nothing else in that tent, so that it was very neat indeed. Titty and the mate had made their tent much more homelike. In the middle of it were the biscuit tins, with the food in them. These tins made two seats. Then at each side of the tent, where their beds were going to be, they had spread out their blankets and folded in the tops of them. The cooking things were neatly arranged in one corner, just inside the tent. Outside the tent, on the rope on which the tent was hung, two towels were drying. Captain John looked in and then went back to his own tent and