“Then don’t make me so. Now, I appeal to the captain here. Has not the boy been wandering about the deck all day with Bartlett, asking him questions about the sails, and talking to the men, and using his glass whenever there was a good bit of the land to see?”
“Well, yes.”
“Well yes, indeed! What more do you want? We can only go on two legs, we men; we can’t fly.”
“Captain Bradleigh seems of a different opinion with this yacht. He makes us swim and pretty well fly.”
“Yes, but what was Jack a month ago? Going about the house like a boy in a nightmare, or else with his hands supporting his heavy head, while he was A plus B-ing, squaring nothing, and extracting roots, or building up calculations with logs. He isn’t like the boy he was when he came on board.”
“That’s true,” said the captain quietly. “His interest is being awakened, and something else too—his appetite.”
“Yes; he certainly eats twice as much, and is not so particular as to what it is.”
“There!” cried the doctor triumphantly. “And what does that mean?”
“That the sea-air makes him hungry.”
“Bah! that isn’t all. It means that Nature keeps on asking for more bricks and mortar to go on building up the works that were begun years ago and not finished—muscle and bone and nerve, sir, so as to get him a sound body; and mind you, a sound body generally means a sound brain. Everything in a proper state of balance.”