Page:Frank Stockton - Rudder Grange.djvu/62

Rh some difficulty, I roused the good woman, and after seeing Euphemia and Pomona safely in the house, I left them to tell the tale, and ran back to the boat.

The boarder was working like a Trojan. He had already a pile of our furniture on the beach.

I set about helping him, and for an hour we laboured at this hasty and toilsome moving. It was indeed a toilsome business. The floors were shelving, the stairs leaned over sideways, ever so far, and the gang-plank was desperately short and steep.

Still, we saved quite a number of household articles. Some things we broke, and some we forgot, and some things were too big to move in this way; but we did very well, considering the circumstances.

The wind roared, the tide rose, and the boat groaned and creaked. We were in the kitchen, trying to take the stove apart (the boarder was sure we could carry it up if we could get the pipe out and the legs and doors off), when we heard a crash. We rushed on deck and found that the garden had fallen in! Making our way as well as we could toward the gaping rent in the deck, we saw that the turnip-bed had gone down bodily into the boarder's room. He did not hesitate, but scrambled down his narrow stairs. I followed him. He struck a match that he had in his pocket, and lighted a little lantern that hung under the stairs. His room was a perfect rubbish-heap. The floor, bed, chairs, pitcher, basin—everything was covered or filled with garden mould and turnips. Never did I behold such a scene. He stood in the midst of it, holding his lantern high above his head. At length he spoke.

"If we had time," he said, "we might come down here and pick out a lot of turnips."

"But how about your furniture?" I exclaimed.