“But really, sir, the shriek of your hooter would have dispelled all the romance and mystery. Only I’m hungry now. Aren’t you, lads?”
“Rather,” said Charlie; and Walter nodded and smiled.
Come to think of it, there is no country in the world like the Antarctic for making people hungry. If we could send off our dyspeptic millions there, they would all come back with appetites which would speedily put up the price of meat.
* * * * *
I think it really was very good of Ingomar to put himself about in pleasing the boys, which he did in every way he could and at every opportunity.
Older people than he would say that he was not much past his own boyhood, being only about three and twenty. But listen, lads, I myself and many others are believers in young blood. Youth has spirit, dash, and go.
At the University, in which I was reared and nurtured, no student considered himself a boy at seventeen. If you had called me a boy in those days, you would have had to strip, and then you would have had to depend a good deal on your muscle and science to get yourself out of the scrape. I’m not going to preach. That isn’t my form, but if a lad of seventeen doesn’t begin to look ahead and find out that he wasn’t put into this world just for the fun of the thing, then, bother me, if I think he’ll ever be a real man. So at twenty-three, the ages of both Ingomar and Lieutenant Curtis, the mind should be fairly moulded.
As for Curtis, I never met a sailor of greater promise, from a really scientific point of view. Naturalist, meteorologist, hydrographist (photographist, too, if there be science in that), and any number of other “ists” thrown in to make up the weight.
Bold and determined was he, too. He liked to get to the bottom of things, just as with his newest dredging machines and sounding gear he liked to get in touch with the bottom of the sea, whether it were but a few fathoms deep, or miles.