As soon as Mark had recovered a little from his first surprise, he sent Bob below to bring up some buckets filled with the earth brought from Loam Rock, or island. This soil was laid carefully around each of the plants, the two working alternately at the task, until a bucket-full had been laid in each hill. Mark did not know it at the time, but subsequent experience gave him reason to suspect, that this forethought saved most of his favourites from premature deaths. Seed might germinate, and the plants shoot luxuriantly from out of the ashes of the volcano, under the united influence of the sun and rains, in that low latitude, but it was questionable whether the nourishment to be derived from such a soil, if soil it could yet be called, would prove to be sufficient to sustain the plants when they got to be of an age and size to demand all the support they wanted. So convinced did Mark become, as the season advanced, of the prudence of what he then did out of a mere impulse, that he passed hours, subsequently, in raising loam to the summit of the mount, in order to place it in the different hills. For this purpose, Bob rigged a little derrick, and fitted a whip, so that the buckets were whipped up, sailor-fashion, after two or three experiments made in lugging them up by hand had suggested to the honest fellow that there might be a cheaper mode of obtaining their wishes.
When Mark was temporarily satisfied with gazing at his new-found treasures, he went to work to scatter the grass stood over the summit and sides of the crater. Inside, there was not much motive for sowing anything, the rock being so nearly perpendicular; but on the outside of the hill, or 'mountain,' as Bob invariably called it, the first ten or twelve feet excepted, there could be no obstacle to the seeds taking; though from the want of soil much of it, Mark knew, must be lost; but, if it only took in spots, and gave him a few green patches for the eye to rest on, he felt he should be amply rewarded for his trouble. Bob scattered guano wherever he scattered grass-seed, and in this way they walked entirely round the crater, Mark using up at least half of Friend Abraham White's provision in behalf of the savages of Fejee, in the way of the grasses. A gentle soft rain soon came to moisten this seed, and to embed it with whatever there was of soil on the surface, giving it every chance to take root that circumstances would allow.