"what
difference it made to him."

And he shook hands with me, and bade me good-bye. I don't believe he has
ever found anybody who could give him the answer to this puzzle.

The trip over to Nassau was a very different thing from our voyage down
the coast from New York to Savannah. The sea was comparatively smooth,
and, although the vessel rolled a good deal in the great swells, we did
not mind it much. The air was delightful, and after we had gone down the
Florida coast, and had turned to cross the Gulf Stream to our islands,
the weather became positively warm, even out here on the sea, and we
were on deck nearly all the time.

Mr. Chipperton was in high spirits. He enjoyed the deep blue color of
the sea; he went into ecstasies over the beautiful little nautiluses
that sailed along by the ship; he watched with wild delight the
porpoises that followed close by our side, and fairly shouted when a big
fellow would spring into the air, or shoot along just under the surface,
as if he had a steam-engine in his tail. But when he saw a school of
flying-fish rise up out of the sea, just a little ahead of us, and go
skimming along like birds, and then drop again into the water, he was so
surprised and delighted that he scarcely knew how to express his
feelings.

Of course, we younger people enjoyed all these things, but I was
surprised to see that Corny was more quiet than usual, and spent a good
deal of her time in reading, although she would spring up and run to the
railing whenever her father announced some wonderful discovery. Mr.
Chipperton would have been a splendid man for Columbus to have taken
along with him on his first trip to these islands. He would have kept up
the spirits of the sailors.

I asked Corny what she was reading, and she showed me her book. It was a
big, fat pamphlet about the Bahamas, and she was studying up for her
stay there. She was a queer girl. She had not been to school very much,
her mother said, for they had been travelling about a good deal of late
years; but she liked to study up special things, in which she took an
interest. Sometimes she was her own teacher, and sometimes, if they
staid in any one place long enough, she took regular lessons.

"I teach her as much as I can," said her mother, "although I would much
rather have her go regularly to school. But her father is so fond of her
that he will not have her away from him, and as Mr. Chipperton's lung
requires him to be moving from