"Drinkwater! Isn’t that the darnedest? I can’t look sidewise at anything that isn’t water before the other guys begin to kid me all over the lot. Many a time I _would_ drink water—and don’t want anything but water to drink—and I’ll be hanged if I don’t feel ashamed to have them see me doing it—and me with that name! What do you know about that?" As I was too gravely preoccupied to tell him what I knew about that, he began once more his curious pawing along the wall, till he seized a cap which he pulled down on his head. "Oh, hang!" he muttered then. "That’s yours." This, too, was information, enabling me to assume that the clothing which hung on the same hook was mine also. I looked at it with some interest, but also with a renewed feeling of discomfort. It was the sort of suit in which I found it difficult to see myself. Of a smooth gray twill, sleek and provincial, there was that about it which suggested the rural beau. Having momentarily lost his orientation, the boy clawed in the air again, touching first this object and then that, fingering it, considering it, locating it, till once more he got his bearings. All this he did with a slowness and caution that forced on me the recognition of the fact, which I might have perceived before, that he was blind. Nothing betrayed it but his motions. The starry eyes were apparently uninjured. Only, when you knew his infirmity, you noticed that the starriness was like that of an electric lamp, bright, but with a brightness not connected with intelligence. It was an aimless brightness, directed at nothing. The blaze of the quick pupils was like that which a window flashes back to the sunset, all from outside, and due to nothing in the house. Dressed now for leaving the cabin, he still had something to tell me. "Say, there’s one man on board who’ll be glad to hear you’ve waked up. That’s the doctor. Not the ship’s doctor," he hastened to explain, "but my doctor. Say, he’s about the whitest!" My questions were inspired not so much by sympathy with him, though that affected me, as by the hope of getting sidelights on myself. "Do you travel with a doctor?" "Came over with him just before the war. I was his stenog. Name of Averill. Been in and out to see you five and six times a day ever since we sailed. Tell you all about him after I’ve had my breakfast. Off now to send in John-M’rie. Don’t forget what I said about the griddle-cakes. They can give ’em to you good and greasy if you kick; but if you don’t they’ll just hand you out a pile of asbestos table-mats." *CHAPTER II*