object he touched and the corresponding sounds, and noted particularly the characters he jotted down upon the paper. Then suddenly I saw light amid the darkness! Although this was but my first lesson, I was making faster progress than either of us could have anticipated--my knowledge of ancient Greek was proving invaluable! At the first glance, I observed the resemblance between the letters my instructor was inditing and those of the old Greek, even as I had noticed the resemblance on the stone inscriptions; and it was not many minutes before I discovered that some of the words, although not to be recognized when pronounced, were written in a style closely similar to the Greek, and were obviously built upon Greek roots. This was not true of all the words, but it was true of such a large percentage, that I had hopes of soon being able to speak the language and so to solve the mystery of this fantastic deep-sea people. After about two hours, my instructor rose from his seat, shoved the pad of paper back into his pocket, and indicated that our lessons were over for the day. But he smiled upon me graciously, as though to indicate that I was a not unpromising pupil; and he spoke a word which I thought I recognized as “Tomorrow,” after which he saluted me with a courteous wave of the hand, and joining Rawson’s instructor, went ambling leisurely out of view. It was with a wry smile that Rawson rejoined me. “Say, did you get anything out of it at all?” he inquired. “I just couldn’t make head or tail of it. Heavens, at this rate it would take me ten years to learn my A, B, C’s!” I did not confide that I had private reasons for feeling more optimistic than my friend. But, after I had offered to help and was rejected, I was content to let the conversation drift to other subjects. Rawson was now annoyingly given to useless lamentations. Hotly he deplored our plight; he declared that he no longer saw anything romantic about it, and least of all perceived anything romantic about being made to go to school again; and he reminded me time after time of Captain Gavison and the crew, whom we had last seen stranded in the wilderness with the disabled X-111, and who were no doubt awaiting our return in hope that was fast giving way to despair. Though I did not share in Rawson’s dislike of our present quarters, and though I was deterred from leaving, not only by hopes of learning the language but by thoughts of the nameless fair one, yet I had to listen when Rawson spoke of our duty to our waiting comrades; and, in spite of the forbidding precedent set by Stranahan and Ripley, I could not but consent to try to return to our shipmates.