At lunch I found a seat at the base of the big willow out front of the school and unwrapped the waxed paper from the thick ham sandwich Mama had fixed me. I munched it and conjugated Latin verbs in my head, trying to make the day pass. Oly and the fellows were roughhousing in the yard, playing follow-the-leader with Amos Gundersen out front, showing off by walking on his hands and then springing upright. Amos' mother came from circus people in Russia, and all the kids in his family wanted to be acrobats when they grew up. I tried not to watch them. I was engrossed in a caterpillar that was crawling up my pants-leg when Mr Adelson cleared his throat behind me. I started, and the caterpillar tumbled to the ground, and then Mr Adelson was squatting on his long haunches at my side. "How are you liking your first day, James?" he asked, in his raspy voice. "It's fine, sir." "And the work? You're able to keep up with the class?" "It's not a problem for me. We studied this when I was away." "Are you bored? Do you need more of a challenge?" "It's fine, sir." _Unless you want to assign me some large-prime factoring problems_. "Right, then. Don't hesitate to call on me if things are moving too slowly or too quickly. I mean that." I snuck another look at him. He seemed sincere. "Why aren't you playing with your chums?" "I don't feel like it." "You just wanted to think?" "I guess so." Why wouldn't he just leave me alone? "It's hard to come home, isn't it?" I stared at my shoes. What did he know about it? "I've been around the world, you know that? I sailed with a tramp steamer, the _Slippery Trick_. I saw the naked savages of Polynesia, and the voodoo witches that the freed slaves of the Caribbean worship, and the coolies pulling rickshaws in Peking. It was so _hard_ to come home to Frisco, after five years at sea." To my surprise, he sat down next to me, in the dirt and roots at the base of the tree. "You know, aboard the _Trick_, they called me Runnyguts -- I threw up every hour for my first month. I was more reliable than the Watch! But they didn't mean anything by it. When you live with a crew for years, you become a different person. We'd be out at sea, nothing but water as far as the eye could see, and we'd be playing cards on-deck. We'd told each other every joke we knew already, and every story about home, and we knew that deck of cards so well, which one had salt-water stains on the back and which one turned up at corner and which one had been torn, and we'd just scream at the sun, so bored! But then we'd put in to port at some foreign city, and we'd come down the plank in our best clothes, twenty men who knew each other better than brothers, hard and brown from months at sea, and it felt like whatever happened in that strange port-of-call, we'd come out on top."