to—even a medium sized whale, and the one we’re talkin’ about is a extry big whale.”

“It couldn’t,” says Rameses III, “because it didn’t; and that hain’t science, it’s common sense; and how do I know it? I’ll tell you: because nobody but this here feller Jonah ever claimed to be swallered by a whale, and there’s been tall liars since his day. The’s been men had all sorts of things happen to ’em but never another but jest this here one Jonah feller dared claim a whale swallered him and then spit him up ’cause he didn’t like the taste of him. And this here Jonah wa’n’t no American, either. He was some kind of a furriner, and them furriners is as full of lies as an egg is of meat, and that’s common sense. If this here whale in question was to up and swaller an American, and this here American was to come back and tell it and hold up his hand and cross his heart, why, mebby I’d b’lieve him. But not no Dago, or whatever this Jonah was——”

And then I sort of lost track of things, and the next I knew it was morning and Mr. Browning was shaking me to get up.

CHAPTER III

Next morning we hauled up our anchor and left the Thimbles early. Rameses III did not have breakfast ready until we were well out in the Sound and had headed for Point Judith. It was another beautiful day. The Sound was as smooth as a piece of glass and there wasn’t a thing to do but be lazy, and there are times when I like being lazy a lot. Catty said he felt like he could lay back in a chair on deck and look at the water and snooze for a month. But I knew he couldn’t. Snoozing wasn’t in his line. No, sir, says I to myself. In half an hour that kid will be down taking the engine to pieces or doing something else to get us both into trouble. That’s the kind he is. He can’t sit still, and if there isn’t a thing to do, why, he invents something.

This time it was the engine room, and we hadn’t been through breakfast half an hour when he was down there sure enough, gassing with Tom, the engineer, and learning how to run the thing. By noon he knew all the parts of the engine by their nicknames, and it was all Tom could do to stop him from commencing with a screwdriver and a monkey wrench to find out what it looked like inside. He was daubed with grease from head to foot where he’d tried to crawl into the shaft tunnel to see how the clutch worked, and his fingers were blistered from monkeying with the hot cylinders. But he was happy, and what more can you ask.

I wasn’t het up much over engines, but I did want to learn 

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