“That story was perfectly grand,” she announced, straightening up from the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her forehead with a red, steamy hand; “but it makes me sad.  I want to cry.  There is too many sad things in the world anyway.  It makes me happy to think about happy things.  Now if he’d married her, and—­You don’t mind, Mart?” she queried apprehensively.  “I just happen to feel that way, because I’m tired, I guess.  But the story was grand just the same, perfectly grand.  Where are you goin’ to sell it?”

“That’s a horse of another color,” he laughed.

“But if you did sell it, what do you think you’d get for it?”

“Oh, a hundred dollars.  That would be the least, the way prices go.”

“My!  I do hope you’ll sell it!”

“Easy money, eh?” Then he added proudly:  “I wrote it in two days.  That’s fifty dollars a day.”

He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare.  He would wait till some were published, he decided, then she would understand what he had been working for.  In the meantime he toiled on.  Never had the spirit of adventure lured him more strongly than on this amazing exploration of the realm of mind.  He bought the text-books on physics and chemistry, and, along with his algebra, worked out problems and demonstrations.  He took the laboratory proofs on faith, and his intense power of vision enabled him to see the reactions of chemicals more understandingly than the average student saw them in the laboratory.  Martin wandered on through the heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he was getting to the nature of things.  He had accepted the world as the world, but now he was comprehending the organization of it, the play and interplay of force and matter.  Spontaneous explanations of old matters were continually arising in his mind.  Levers and purchases fascinated him, and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks and tackles at sea.  The theory of navigation, which enabled the ships to travel unerringly their courses over the pathless ocean, was made clear to him.  The mysteries of storm, and rain, and tide were revealed, and the reason for the existence of trade-winds made him wonder whether he had written his article on the northeast trade too soon.  At any rate he knew he could write it better now.  One afternoon he went out with Arthur to the University of California, and, with bated breath and a feeling of religious awe, went through the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics professor lecturing to his classes.

But he did not neglect his writing.  A stream of short stories flowed from his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of verse—­the kind he saw printed in the magazines—­though he lost his head and wasted two weeks on a tragedy in blank verse, the swift rejection of which, by half a dozen magazines, dumfounded him.  Then he discovered Henley and wrote a series of sea-poems on the model