“How’s that?” inquired the mate with a serious face.
“You should have been a novelist,” laughed Jack. “With your imagination, you’d have made a fortune.”
“Well, I’ll never make one at sea, that’s one sure thing,” said Mr. Brown, with a conviction born of experience.
The crew managed the boat silently. They were cheered by Mr. Brown’s extensive vocabulary and picturesque speech, and stuck to their duties like real seamen.
As time passed, however, and there was not a sign of boats on the sea, and the sparkling water danced emptily under the burning sun, some of the crew become restive.
“Aw, you cawn’t moike me believe there’s a bloomin’ thing in this bally wireless,” muttered a British sailor. “It’s awl a bloomin’ bit of spoof, that’s what it is, moites. We moight as well go a choising the ghost of Admiral Nelson as be chivvying arter this old crawft.”
His attitude toward wireless was typical of that of most sailors, and it may be added—some landsmen!
Their intelligence appears to balk at grasping the idea of an electric wave being volleyed through space, although they accept hearing and eyesight,—dependent, both of them, on sound and sight waves,—as an everyday fact.
Jack felt like giving a little lecture on wireless right then and there. It nettled him to think that the wonderful invention which has done so much to render sea-travel safe, accounts of which appear in the columns of the newspapers every day, should be belittled by the very men who owed so much to it.
“But what’s the use,” thought he. “It would only be wasted breath. But if everyone could know it as I do, the world would be full of wireless enthusiasts; and then what a job we’d have picking up messages!”