Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/234

 encouragingly in Ping-Pong's direction and making surprising faces at her.

A little later they moored the Sham-Poo and lowered the sail, a thing they now accomplished with much more speed and skill than at first. The three of them formed a semicircle around the brazier, with the darkening river behind them, and they began their dinner. Mark, to Alan's disgusted amusement, insisted on taking Ping-Pong upon his knee and feeding her rice before he began his own. Soon she was plunging her own small fist into the bowl and licking her fingers approvingly, while she gazed complacently at her rescuer.

"It's not teaching her the best of table-manners," Mark said, shaking his head; "but that's a minor consideration—very minor."

"What isn't a minor consideration is how much longer we're going to go cruising all over the Flowery Kingdom with our menagerie," Alan remarked.

"Well," his brother said, "as far as I can see, as I've said before, we'll simply have to keep on going till we run across a European settlement in some big place; people who