Martin. And yet--I cannot
explain why, unless it was the woman in me, the Irish-woman, or
something like it--but I began to depreciate Martin, in order to "hoosh"
him on, so that he might say more on the same subject.

"Then he _did_ take his degree," I said. "He was never very clever at
his lessons, I remember, and I heard that he was only just able to
scrape through his examinations."

The young doctor fell to my bait like a darling. With a flaming face and
a nervous rush of racy words which made me think that if I closed my
eyes I should be back on the steps of the church in Rome talking to
Martin himself, he told me I was mistaken if I thought his friend was a
numskull, for he had had "the biggest brain-pan in College Green," and
the way he could learn things when he wanted to was wonderful.

He might be a bit shaky in his spelling, and perhaps he couldn't lick
the world in Latin, but his heart was always in exploring, and the way
he knew geography, especially the part of it they call the "Unknown,"
the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and what Charcot had done there, and
Biscoe and Bellamy and D'Urville and Greely and Nansen and Shackleton
and Peary, was enough to make the provost and professors look like fools
of the earth by the side of him.

"Why, what do you think?" said the doctor. "When he went to London to
apply for his billet, the Lieutenant said to him: 'You must have been
down there before, young man.' 'No such luck,' said Martin. 'But you
know as much about the Antarctic already as the whole boiling of us put
together,' said the Lieutenant. Yes, by St. Patrick and St. Thomas, he's
a geographer any way."

I admitted that much, and to encourage the doctor to go on I told him
where I had seen Martin last, and what he had said of his expedition.

"In Rome you say?" said the doctor, with a note of jealousy. "You beat
me there then. I saw him off from London, though. A few of us Dublin
boys, being in town at the time, went down to Tilbury to see him sail,
and when they were lifting anchor and the tug was hitching on, we stood
on the pier--sixteen strong--and set up some of our college songs. 'Stop
your noising, boys,' said he, 'the Lieutenant will be hearing you.' But
not a bit of it. We sang away as long as we could see him going out with
the tide, and then we went back in the train, smoking our pipes like so
many Vauxhall chimneys, and narra a word out of the one of us. . . .
Yes, yes, there are some men li