CHAPTER XIII.
A brief summary of those twelve months we spent at Elche.
The surprising activity with which we attacked our domestic business at Elche lasted about two days and a half, Dawson labouring at his shed, I at the cultivation of the garden, and Moll quitting her cooking and household affairs, as occasion permitted, to lend a helping hand first to her father and then to me. And as man, when this fever of enterprise is upon him, must for ever be seeking to add to his cares, we persuaded Don Sanchez to let us have two she-goats to stall in the shed and consume our waste herbage, that we might have milk and get butter, which they do in these parts by shaking the cream in a skin bag (a method that seems simple enough till you have been shaking the bag for twenty minutes in vain on a sultry morning) without cost. But the novelty of the thing wearing off, our eagerness rapidly subsided, and so about the third day (as I say), the heat being prodigious, we toiled with no spirit at all.
Dawson was the first to speak his mind. Says he, coming to me whilst I was still sweating over my shovel:
"I've done it, but hang me if I do more. There's a good piece of work worth thirty shillings of any man's money, but who'll give me a thank ye for it when we leave here next year?"
And then he can find nothing better to do than fall a-commenting on my labours, saying there was but precious
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