“I have made him stay to luncheon for once,” said Arthur; “he couldn’t refuse me; we are to part so soon.”  Arthur got next to Lucy, and had David on his left.  Mr. Talboys gave Mr. Fountain a look, and very soon began to play his battery upon David.

“How do you naval officers find time to learn geometry?”

“What? don’t you know it is a part of our education, sir?”

“I never heard that before.”

“That is odd; but perhaps you have spent all your life ashore” (this in commiserating accents).  David then politely explained to Mr. Talboys that a man who looked one day to command a ship must not only practice seamanship, but learn navigation, and that navigation was a noble art founded on the exact sciences as well as on practical experiences; that there did still linger upon the ocean a few of the old captains, who, born at a period when a ship, in making a voyage, used to run down her longitude first, and then begin to make her latitude, could handle a ship well, and keep her off a lee shore if they saw it in time, but were, in truth, hardly to be trusted to take her from port to port.  “We get a word with these old salts now and then when we are becalmed alongside, and the questions they put make us quite feel for them.  Then they trust entirely to their instruments.  They can take an observation, but they can’t verify one.  They can tack her and wear her (I have seen them do one when they should have done the other), and they can read the sky and the water better than we young ones; and while she floats they stick to her, and the greater the danger the louder the oaths—­but that is all.”  He then assured them with modest fervor that much more than that was expected of the modern commander, particularly in the two capital articles of exact science and gentlemanly behavior.  He concluded with considerable grace by apologizing for his enthusiastic view of a profession that had been too often confounded with the faults of its professors—­faults that were curable, and that they would all, he hoped, live long enough to see cured.  Then, turning to Miss Fountain, he said:  “And if I began by despising my business, and taking a small view of it, how should I ever hold sticks with my able competitors, who study it with zeal and admiration?”

Lucy.  “I don’t quite understand all you have said, Mr. Dodd, but that last I think is unanswerable.”

Fountain.  “I am sure of it.  As the Duke of Wellington said the other day in the House of Lords, ’That is a position I defy any noble lord to assault with success’—­haw! ho!”

Mr. Talboys averted his attack.  “Pray, sir,” said he, with a sneer, “may I ask, have nautical commanders a particular taste for education as well as science?”

“Not that I know of.  If you mean me, I am hungry to learn, and I find few but what can teach me something, and what little I know I am willing to impart, sir; give and take.”

“It is the direction of your teaching that seems to me so singular.  Mathematics are horrible enough, and greatly to be avoided.”