er on Martin conceived the idea that the North Pole was the
locality immediately surrounding his father's house, and every day he
would set out on voyages of exploration over the garden, the road and
the shore, finding, by his own account, a vast world of mysterious
things and undiscovered places. By some means--nobody knew how--the boy
who could not learn his lessons studied his father's German atlas, and
there was not a name in it north of Spitzbergen which he had not got by
heart. He transferred them all to Ellan, so that the Sky Hill became
Greenland, and the Black Head became Franz Josef Land, and the Nun's
Well became Behring Strait, and Martha's Gullet became New Siberia, and
St. Mary's Rock, with the bell anchored on it, became the pivot of the
earth itself.

He could swim like a fish and climb a rock like a lizard, and he kept a
log-book, on the back pages of the Doctor's book of visits, which he
called his "diarrhea." And now if you lost him you had only to look up
to the ridge of the roof, or perhaps on to the chimney stack, which he
called his crow's nest, and there you found him, spying through his
father's telescope and crying out:

"Look-out ahead! Ice floes from eighty-six latitude fourteen point
north, five knots to the starboard bow."

His mother laughed until she cried when she told me all this, but there
is no solemnity like that of a child, and to me it was a marvellous
story. I conceived a deep admiration for the doctor's boy, and saw
myself with eyes of worship walking reverently by his side. I suppose my
poor lonely heart was hungering after comradeship, for being a
sentimental little ninny I decided to offer myself to the doctor's boy
as his sister.

The opportunity was dreadfully long in coming. It did not come until the
next morning, when the door of my room flew open with a yet louder bang
than before, and the boy entered in a soap-box on wheels, supposed to be
a sledge, and drawn by a dog, an Irish terrier, which being red had been
called William Rufus. His hat was tied over his ears with a tape from
his mother's apron, and he wore a long pair of his father's knitted
stockings which covered his boots and came up to his thighs.

He did not at first take any more notice of me than on the previous day,
but steering his sledge round the room he shouted to his dog that the
chair by the side of my bed was a glacier and the sheep-skin rug was
floating ice.

After a while we began to talk, an