“What photographer? What pictures?” Amelia looked puzzled.
“You mean to say you haven’t seen the photographer at all!” Bess was incredulous. “Why, he’s always around with that camera of his. It’s almost impossible to sit or stand any place on deck without his taking your picture!”
“Old Procrastination Boggs,” Laura teased, “has been so busy trying to figure out the time so as to keep her clocks straight that she hasn’t known what was going on around her. Have you decided yet,” she asked, “whether you set the clock ahead or back when you are traveling east?
“I went into Amelia’s cabin last night,” she explained to the others, “and there she was sitting on the floor with her clocks all around her. She looked just as she did the night we first saw her in her room at Lakeview. This time, however, she had a pencil and paper in her hand. At first, I thought she had lost her mind, for there were little marks like chicken scratches on the paper.”
“Oh, it didn’t look like that at all,” Amelia protested. “You just don’t recognize a good sketch when you see one. That round mark was the sun. The long straight one was the path it takes as it moves from the east to the west.”
“But the sun doesn’t move,” Rhoda interrupted. “The earth does.”
“Well, anyway,” Laura continued her teasing, “there she was on the floor with her clocks. Each one was set at a different time and Amelia was drawing pictures. I heard her muttering to herself, ‘Now, if the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and the ship travels east, then we lose no, we gain time. No, we lose time.’ She couldn’t make up her mind, so she began all over again, ‘if the sun rises in the west, I mean the east, and we travel west, no east’—Say, which way are we traveling?” Laura had confused herself.
“East.” Nan laughed. “And don’t go any further or you’ll have us all confused. Upstairs, near the Purser’s window, there’s a blackboard. On it, it says, ‘Ship’s passengers please note: set your watches ahead 40 minutes each night at 9, if you wish them to agree with ship’s time.’”
“I know that now,” Amelia laughed, ruefully. “I saw it the morning after I’d had such a time. And you needn’t act so superior,” she looked at Laura, “because you sat down on the floor with me and tried to figure it out too!”
The picture that this brought to mind caused all the girls to laugh.