From time to time, in certain places where the landing was easy, the canoe was stopped, when Gideon Spilett, Herbert, and Pencroft, their guns in their hands, and preceded by Top, jumped on shore.  Without expecting game, some useful plant might be met with, and the young naturalist was delighted with discovering a sort of wild spinach, belonging to the order of chenopodiaceae, and numerous specimens of cruciferae, belonging to the cabbage tribe, which it would certainly be possible to cultivate by transplanting.  There were cresses, horseradish, turnips, and lastly, little branching hairy stalks, scarcely more than three feet high, which produced brownish grains.

Do you know what this plant is?” asked Herbert of the sailor.

“Tobacco!” cried Pencroft, who evidently had never seen his favorite plant except in the bowl of his pipe.

“No, Pencroft,” replied Herbert; “this is not tobacco, it is mustard.”

“Mustard be hanged!” returned the sailor; “but if by chance you happen to come across a tobacco-plant, my boy, pray don’t scorn that!”

“We shall find it some day!” said Gideon Spilett.

“Well!” exclaimed Pencroft, “when that day comes, I do not know what more will be wanting in our island!”

These different plants, which had been carefully rooted up, were carried to the canoe, where Cyrus Harding had remained buried in thought.

The reporter, Herbert, and Pencroft in this manner frequently disembarked, sometimes on the right bank, sometimes on the left bank of the Mercy.

The latter was less abrupt, but the former more wooded.  The engineer ascertained by consulting his pocket-compass that the direction of the river from the first turn was obviously southwest and northeast, and nearly straight for a length of about three miles.  But it was to be supposed that this direction changed beyond that point, and that the Mercy continued to the north-west, towards the spurs of Mount Franklin, among which the river rose.

During one of these excursions, Gideon Spilett managed to get hold of two couples of living gallinaceae.  They were birds with long, thin beaks, lengthened necks, short wings, and without any appearance of a tail.  Herbert rightly gave them the name of tinamous, and it was resolved that they should be the first tenants of their future poultry-yard.

But till then the guns had not spoken, and the first report which awoke the echoes of the forest of the Far West was provoked by the appearance of a beautiful bird, resembling the kingfisher.

“I recognize him!” cried Pencroft, and it seemed as if his gun went off by itself.

“What do you recognize?” asked the reporter.

“The bird which escaped us on our first excursion, and from which we gave the name to that part of the forest.”

“A jacamar!” cried Herbert.