When Claude got there, the first person to greet him when announced was the learned professor himself, and a very bustling, dignified little man he was.
“Ha! ha!” he laughed, as he shook Claude warmly by the hand. “I couldn’t have believed it. Really, it is strange!”
“Believe what?” said Claude, bluntly.
“Why, that you were so young a man. Should have thought from your writings you must be forty if a day.”
It was Claude’s turn to laugh.
“But there, never mind. Authors are always taken to be older men than they are. No, I don’t think that youth will be an insuperable objection. Besides, youth has courage, youth has fire and health, to say nothing of a recuperative power of rising again even after being floored by a thousand misfortunes.”
“Difficulties, I dare say,” said Claude, “were made to be overcome.”
“To be sure. Well, then, having heard and read a good deal about your doings up North, we thought we would send for you, and instead of having a learned day discussion round a green baize-covered table, to invite you to join us at dinner—quite a quiet affair—and just to chat matters over.”
It must be confessed that poor Claude did not feel altogether at home among those extremely learned men.
The conversation was all about previous voyages of scientific discovery. Had those gentlemen been more practical and less theoretical, Claude would have been all with them; but it was evident from the way they spoke that not one of them had ever been on blue water, much less on the stormy seas of the Far North.