boy, what's your name?"

"Mart," was the answer.

"Where do you come from?"

"Spitzbergen."

I cannot remember that this intelligence astonished me, for when the
inverted face had become scarlet, and the legs went down and the head
came up, and my visitor tossed several somersaults over the end of my
bed, to the danger of my breakfast tray, and then, without a word more,
tumbled out of the room, I was still watching in astonishment.

I did not know at that time that these were the ways which since the
beginning of the world have always been employed by savages and boys
when they desire to commend themselves to the female of their kind, so
that when the doctor's wife came smiling upstairs I asked her if the
little boy who had been to see me was not quite well.

"Bless you, yes, dear, but that's his way," she said, and then she told
me all about him.

His name was Martin Conrad and he was her only child. His hat, which had
awakened my interest, was an old one of his father's, and it was the
last thing he took off when he undressed for bed at night and the first
thing he put on in the morning. When the hole came into its crown his
mother had tried to hide it away but he had always found it, and when
she threw it into the river he had fished it out again.

He was the strangest boy, full of the funniest fancies. He used to say
that before he was born he lived in a tree and was the fellow who turned
on the rain. It was with difficulty that he could be educated, and every
morning on being awakened, he said he was "sorry he ever started this
going to school." As a consequence he could not read or write as well as
other boys of his age, and his grammar was still that of the peasant
people with whom he loved to associate.

Chief among these was our gardener, old Tommy the Mate, who lived in a
mud cabin on the shore and passed the doctor's house on his way to work.
Long ago Tommy had told the boy a tremendous story. It was about Arctic
exploration and an expedition he had joined in search of Franklin. This
had made an overpowering impression on Martin, who for mouths afterwards
would stand waiting at the gate until Tommy was going by, and then say:

"Been to the North Pole to-day, Tommy?"

Whereupon Tommy's "starboard eye" would blink and he would answer:

"Not to-day boy. I don't go to the North Pole more nor twice a day now."

"Don't you, though?" the boy would say, and this would happen every
morning.

But lat