It was weeks before I was sufficiently recovered in body or mind to hear more than I knew. Then the doctor told me:-- "Hall is getting better. He broke his arm in two places, trying to shield the boy from the rocks. He will not speak about it himself, and no one dares mention Archer's name to him. There was neither bruise nor scratch on the little fellow's body, which shows how heroically the other must have tried to save him." I soon recovered, but Hall was ill for many weeks--ill as much from distress of mind as from the injuries he had received. He and I are firm friends to this day; and whenever we meet, we speak often of little Charlie Archer. Hall is a sea captain now, and commands his own vessel in distant seas; but though he has been through many a peril and many a storm since, I can confidently say he never showed himself a better sailor than he did the night we sailed back from the Shargle. CHAPTER SIX. "FIVERS" VERSUS "SIXERS" AT PARKHURST. "I tell you what it is, you fellows, I shall learn to swim!" The speaker was Bobby Jobson, a hero of some thirteen summers, who, in company with four of us, his schoolfellows, sat on the bank of the Colven, under some willows, dabbling his shins in the clear water of the river. The summer had been tremendously hot. Cricket was out of the question, and boating equally uninviting. The playground had been left deserted to bake and scorch under the fierce sun, and the swings and poles in the gymnasium had blistered and cracked in solitude. The only place where life was endurable was down by the river, and even there it was far too hot to do anything but sit and dabble our feet under the shelter of the trees, and think of icebergs! A few of the fellows, to our unbounded envy, bathed. They could swim, we could not; and if any rule at Parkhurst was strict, it was the rule which forbade any boy who could not swim to bathe in the river, except with special leave and under the care of a master. And so, like so many small editions of Tantalus, we sat on the bank and kicked our heels in the water, and bemoaned the fate which had brought us into the world without web-feet. Young donkeys that we were! The idea of _learning_ to swim had never occurred to any of us till Bobby Jobson, in a happy moment, gave birth to the idea in his ejaculation, "I tell you what it is, you fellows, I shall learn to swim!" "How?" I inquired. "How?" said Jobson; "why, you know, how does every body learn?" and then he was polite enough to call me a duffer. "I'll tell you the way," said Ralley, one of our set. "Lie across a desk on your stomach, two or three hours every day, and kick out with your arms and legs." "Corks and bladders," mildly suggested some one else. "Get old Blades," (that was the boatman) "to tie a rope round your middle and chuck you into the Giant's Pool," kindly proposed another. "Just tumble in where you are," said Ralley, "and see if it doesn't come naturally."