His was the student’s mind, and behind his ability to learn was the indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth.  The grammar he had taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded brain had mastered it.  He noticed the bad grammar used by his shipmates, and made a point of mentally correcting and reconstructing their crudities of speech.  To his great joy he discovered that his ear was becoming sensitive and that he was developing grammatical nerves.  A double negative jarred him like a discord, and often, from lack of practice, it was from his own lips that the jar came.  His tongue refused to learn new tricks in a day.

After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary.  He found that this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he steadily went over and over his lengthening list of pronunciations and definitions, while he invariably memorized himself to sleep.  “Never did anything,” “if I were,” and “those things,” were phrases, with many variations, that he repeated under his breath in order to accustom his tongue to the language spoken by Ruth.  “And” and “ing,” with the “d” and “g” pronounced emphatically, he went over thousands of times; and to his surprise he noticed that he was beginning to speak cleaner and more correct English than the officers themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who had financed the expedition.

The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and Martin had washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted access to the precious volumes.  For a time, so steeped was he in the plays and in the many favorite passages that impressed themselves almost without effort on his brain, that all the world seemed to shape itself into forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy and his very thoughts were in blank verse.  It trained his ear and gave him a fine appreciation for noble English; withal it introduced into his mind much that was archaic and obsolete.

The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he had learned of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned much of himself.  Along with his humbleness because he knew so little, there arose a conviction of power.  He felt a sharp gradation between himself and his shipmates, and was wise enough to realize that the difference lay in potentiality rather than achievement.  What he could do,—­they could do; but within him he felt a confused ferment working that told him there was more in him than he had done.  He was tortured by the exquisite beauty of the world, and wished that Ruth were there to share it with him.  He decided that he would describe to her many of the bits of South Sea beauty.  The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth.  And then,