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We should also have to assume that the ship was loaded with a general cargo, including such unlikely items as tool-chests and cases of vegetable seeds, all of which would be washed ashore undamaged precisely when wanted.

"I don't see what you're laughing at," she said, with a suspicion of a pout. "Hymns are a great deal better for such people than your crazy old books and tool-chests." "Don't be a jay, Marjorie," said Ned bluntly. "He isn't any more such people than we are; and because a fellow is down on his luck he doesn't want everybody shying coffins at him. But here comes Grant; let's see what he says.

Shutters covered it, and these were fastened with a padlock. He considered this padlock attentively; then, drawing from his pocket one of those wonderful knives which are really miniature tool-chests, he raised from a grove the screw-driver which formed part of its equipment, and with neatness and dispatch unscrewed the staple to which the padlock was attached!

In the meantime the Chinaman and the steam-laundry have abolished the Negro's wash-tub, trained white "tonsorial artists" have taken away his barber's chair, and skilled painters and plasterers and mechanics have taken away his paint-brushes and tool-chests. Every year the number of occupations open to him becomes fewer because of his lack of progress in them.

From this a ladder led straight up through a man-hole in the ceiling to the light-room store, set round with shining oil-tanks and stocked with paint-pots, brushes, cans, signalling flags, coils of rope, bags of cotton waste, tool-chests. . . . A second ladder brought them to the kitchen, and a third to the sleeping-room; and here the light of the lantern streamed down on their heads through the open man-hole above them.

Night after night, however, passed, and still the frost did not commence; but as the atmosphere grew colder and colder, everybody believed that their hopes would not long be delayed. Skates, which had long lain dormant in tool-chests and cupboards, were got out and polished. Skating shoes or boots were greased, and straps were repaired.

There were sledges, bales of canvas, which on investigation proved to be tents, coils of rope, pick-axes, shovels, five portable houses in knock-down form, a couple of specially constructed whale boats, so made as to resist any ordinary pressure that might be brought to bear on them in the polar drift, and nail-kegs and tool-chests everywhere.

There's a work-bench bigger than Noah's ark in the drawing-room, another in the library, next size larger, five tool-chests in as many different rooms, a thousand feet of lumber in the front hall, and nine hundred and thirty-seven different colored paint-pots in the guest-room, more or less.