house without a trace of dread, nor passed out through the gates without feeling reprieved! If running breathlessly home from school, slamming the gate on a barbaric world, and seeking protection in a kitchen peopled with fantastic images could be accounted as happiness, he had had happy moments—but at what cost! Had glib grown-ups forgotten their own childhood, or had they been different? Probably that was the answer: he, Paul Minas, was a freak.
The four months had wrought a physical change, for he could now perform feats he would never have attempted in Gym. Moreover, his nautical lore had added cubits to his worldly stature. For the first time in his life he felt he occupied a classifiable status. True, he was a sailor with a difference, just as he had been an organist and a scholar with a difference. But being a sailor was a comfortable, inclusive estate in which there was accommodation for all the parts of one's nature difficult to classify.
In his information concerning ships and seafaring there were still vast gaps. At the same time, thanks to the old man and to his own aptitude, he knew more about navigation from the technical point of view than the oldest A.B. in the forecastle. And he could understand, if not execute, almost any order given on deck. The network of lines and tackle no longer baffled him, and he had ventured as far as the royal yard-arms in his desire to solve puzzles of construction. Ropes that had intrigued him he had followed to their sources, climbing hand over hand, or shinning aloft on converging lines. Once the old man had reprimanded him for attempting to climb a rope which was not supposed to be made fast at the upper end, and which might have come away under his weight. He could steer by the wind or by the compass, except on rough days, when the wheel kicked so hard that his young arms were
