Afterwards they said how sorry they were thus to have given way; and they begged me not to think them ungrateful.
However, they soon resigned themselves to the inevitable, buoyed up by the inexhaustible optimism of youth; and they settled down to live as comfortably as possible among the blacks until some fortuitous occurrence should enable us all to leave these weird and remote regions.

The girls were in constant terror of being left alone--of being stolen, in fact.
They had been told how the natives got wives by stealing them; and they would wake up in the dead of the night screaming in the most heart-rending manner, with a vague, nameless terror.

Knowing that the ordinary food must be repulsive to my new and delightful companions, I went back to a certain island, where, during my journey from the little sand-spit to the main, I had hidden a quantity of corn beneath a cairn.
This corn I now brought back to my Gulf home, and planted for the use of the girls.

They always ate the corn green in the cob, with a kind of vegetable "milk" that exudes from one of the palm-trees.

When they became a little more reconciled to their new surroundings, they took a great interest in their home, and would watch me for hours as I tried to fashion rude tables and chairs and other articles of furniture.