“You can now, Harry, take an observation as well as I can, and before long, if you pay attention, you will become a good navigator,” observed the young mate.
“Thank you for teaching me, Mr Champion; that’s just my wish,” answered Harry.
“Where there’s a will there’s a way; and you, Mr Bass,” said the mate, turning to the other boy, “ought to do as well as Harry by this time.”
“Dickey is fonder of skylarking than shooting the stars,” remarked Harry, laughing.
“Not fonder than you are, Harry,” retorted Dickey Bass, who was the son of a former shipmate of Captain Graybrook, and brought by him to sea through regard for the boy’s father. “I don’t happen to understand sums as well as you do, and so I don’t always get my day’s work done as correctly as yours.”
“Always! why, if we were to go by your reckoning, Dickey, we should have been in the middle of the forests of South America, or on the top of the Andes, before now. When did you ever make a right calculation?” asked Harry, who delighted in bantering Dickey, though they were really great friends.
“Why, for the last fortnight I don’t suppose I have been more than eight or ten degrees out at the utmost.”
Mr Champion and Harry laughed heartily.
“Rather a serious error, Mr Bass.”
“I meant minutes,” said Dickey, “or perhaps seconds; I always forget which is which.”