"Isn't it—because it's heavy?" said I. "And what makes it heavy?" said he. There I was posed, and had no more to say. Mr. Laurence picked up an apple and let it drop.
"What makes that apple fall downward? Being heavy, you will say. But what makes it heavy? I will tell you. Because the earth attracts or draws it downward. The earth attracts everything to itself. The force of that attraction holds the ocean in its bed."
I asked him a lot of questions, and he told me a good deal more to make this clear.
"But the moon has power to attract as well as the earth," he said. "The moon cannot attract so strongly as to draw the ocean out of the bed; but it attracts strongly enough to draw up a great wave of sea-water which travels round and round the earth. Also, by drawing the body of the earth away from the other side, it makes another great wave there. Where these waves are it is high tide, and between them it is low tide."
All this comes back to me, the more clearly, I suppose, because of what followed. For before I could ask any more questions, Mr. Laurence said suddenly, "You would like to spend your life studying these questions."
"I can't, sir; I've got to work," I said.
"My boy, there is no harder work than headwork," said he. "But you mean that you have to work so as to earn money for your parents, and you are right." Then he stood and thought. "I don't see why not," he said; "it's what I have been looking for."
"I don't understand, sir, please."
He laughed and said, "No, I dare say not;" and he didn't tell me any more that day. But a few days later, it came out what he'd been thinking about. He talked things over with Mr. Kingscote first, and Mr. Kingscote spoke to my mother, and then it was put before me.
Mr. Laurence wanted to find a boy to help him in his studies and researches; a quick and thoughtful boy, he said, really interested in such things as interested him. He wanted a boy whom he could trust to help clean his microscopes and telescopes, and other instruments; and to dust and arrange his books; and to keep in order his museum of curiosities; and to do all sorts of things that he wanted done. But also he meant such a boy to have time for study, and he meant to teach him; and he said that if he could find the right sort of boy, he might even some day train him into a sort of "secretary" to himself. That would all depend on what the boy was, of course.