“Bless you, yes, dear, but that’s his way,” she said, and then she told me all about him.

His name was Martin Conrad and he was her only child.  His hat, which had awakened my interest, was an old one of his father’s, and it was the last thing he took off when he undressed for bed at night and the first thing he put on in the morning.  When the hole came into its crown his mother had tried to hide it away but he had always found it, and when she threw it into the river he had fished it out again.

He was the strangest boy, full of the funniest fancies.  He used to say that before he was born he lived in a tree and was the fellow who turned on the rain.  It was with difficulty that he could be educated, and every morning on being awakened, he said he was “sorry he ever started this going to school.”  As a consequence he could not read or write as well as other boys of his age, and his grammar was still that of the peasant people with whom he loved to associate.

Chief among these was our gardener, old Tommy the Mate, who lived in a mud cabin on the shore and passed the doctor’s house on his way to work.  Long ago Tommy had told the boy a tremendous story.  It was about Arctic exploration and an expedition he had joined in search of Franklin.  This had made an overpowering impression on Martin, who for mouths afterwards would stand waiting at the gate until Tommy was going by, and then say: 

“Been to the North Pole to-day, Tommy?”

Whereupon Tommy’s “starboard eye” would blink and he would answer: 

“Not to-day boy.  I don’t go to the North Pole more nor twice a day now.”

“Don’t you, though?” the boy would say, and this would happen every morning.

But later on Martin conceived the idea that the North Pole was the locality immediately surrounding his father’s house, and every day he would set out on voyages of exploration over the garden, the road and the shore, finding, by his own account, a vast world of mysterious things and undiscovered places.  By some means—­nobody knew how—­the boy who could not learn his lessons studied his father’s German atlas, and there was not a name in it north of Spitzbergen which he had not got by heart.  He transferred them all to Ellan, so that the Sky Hill became Greenland, and the Black Head became Franz Josef Land, and the Nun’s Well became Behring Strait, and Martha’s Gullet became New Siberia, and St. Mary’s Rock, with the bell anchored on it, became the pivot of the earth itself.

He could swim like a fish and climb a rock like a lizard, and he kept a log-book, on the back pages of the Doctor’s book of visits, which he called his “diarrhea.”  And now if you lost him you had only to look up to the ridge of the roof, or perhaps on to the chimney stack, which he called his crow’s nest, and there you found him, spying through his father’s telescope and crying out: 

“Look-out ahead!  Ice floes from eighty-six latitude fourteen point north, five knots to the starboard bow.”