"Now read what you have written," he said.
I read my notes aloud, expanding the abbreviations I had made. My interest and absorption had been so intense that I could easily have called over in chronological order the principal events he had just narrated.
"Now," asked Dr. Frost, "do you believe that you can fill in the details from what you can remember of what I said?"
"Yes, sir," said I; "try me."
He asked some questions, and I replied to them.
My memory astonished him. "I must say, Jones, that you have a phenomenally good and a miraculously bad memory. You'll do," he said.
His account of the fight of the ironclads had interested me.
"What has become of the Merrimac?" I asked him.
"We had to destroy her. When Yorktown was evacuated, Norfolk had to follow suit. The Federal fleet is now in James River, some halfway down below Richmond. A blockade has been declared by Lincoln against all the ports of the South. We are exceedingly weak on the water."