"Have you that thing to tell you how fast you go in the ship, Mr. Belgrave?" asked the engineer.
"You mean the log," replied Louis.
"Yes; I mean the log; but I don't know what you call him. La barquilla in Spanish."
"I thought that was a little boat; but you can't learn everything from the dictionary. But you must not call the barquilla either 'him' or 'her' in English, but 'it,' for we have only natural genders; and things that don't have life are neuter," said Louis, who was still assisting the young engineer to improve his English.
"No!" exclaimed Felipe. "What for you call the moon a 'she'? She don't have no life. My book he say"—
"It says," interposed the instructor.
"It says 'the ship she sails well.' The ship don't have no life."
"By a figure of speech called personification, or prosopopœia, we attribute life and action to inanimate objects," replied Louis, laughing, as he quoted from the grammar. "Now you understand it."
"No!" exclaimed Felipe; and his teacher did not suppose he could take in such a sentence; but he proceeded to render it into simpler language, with a long explanation; and possibly at the end of it the pupil had some faint idea of the figure of speech.
"You have not the barquilla?" he asked, glad to drop the grammar and rhetoric.