Page:Tales in Political Economy by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.djvu/27

 "and I'll give you three dinners off the fish I catch in the morning;" or perhaps it was, "Lend me the saw and plane to-day, and you shall have half the number of planks that I am able to make in the time."

It was not long before Green, and indeed all the party, found that amateur carpentering is a very expensive process. One man chopped his toe off with the axe when he was trying to cut down a tree, and was laid up for a month. The planks, that had been sawn and planed by an apothecary's apprentice, might have deserved to be sent to a museum of curiosities; but they were certainly not in their right place when he tried to make them into a door and keep out the blasts of a tropical hurricane. But the shipwrecked sailors not only found that it was easier to cut and bruise their own toes and fingers than to convert the young palms into decent habitations; there was another, and perhaps a more serious disadvantage attaching to their unskilful work. Green often found when the tools were returned to him that they had suffered almost as severely