'Of course they did. What have you been doing with yourself? You don't drink?' 'No, no. I merely sat up reading those books you lent me.' 'You fool! Run upstairs, and put yourself right. Be down as quickly as you can--before they get up from table, if possible. Eat an enormous breakfast, and hold a full cup of tea out at arm's length, to show your hand is steady, and that you have not been to an orgy.' Nevill pushed Osborne up the stairs, and then returned to the breakfast table. 'I hope Mr Osborne is not ill?' said Mrs Barclay, from the top of the table. 'Not a bit of it, not a bit of it,' answered Nevill briskly, looking first at Mrs Barclay, then at Miss Osborne, and finally at Miss Gordon. 'Not a bit of it. He sat up reading, and got frost-bitten all over. He was so much interested he never knew the hour until the bell rang; and then he felt so outrageously hungry he charged down just as he sat, never thinking of putting on his back hair or his goloshes--I beg your pardon, I mean his umbrella and carpet bag. The same kind of thing, and even still more extraordinary, has happened to me over and over again. Once I remember sitting down on a balk of wood at the mouth of the Chesapeake river. I had a favourite author with me--' 'Munchausen?' interrupted the solid-looking man. 'No, sir; the book was "Grotesque Animals," by E. W. Cooke. Well, I began reading, and never noticed anything but the book for a whole day. I had begun to read at six o'clock of a summer morning, and never took my eyes off the book until I could read no more. Well, judge of my surprise at finding myself out of sight of land, away in the Atlantic! I had not minded the rising of the tide, and the balk had been floated and carried out to sea. The most wonderful thing about the affair was that my legs had not been eaten off by sharks; for there were thousands of sharks about, and my legs were about nine inches in the water. How was it I had escaped, you will reasonably ask--' 'To be unreasonably answered,' interrupted the solid-looking man, with a smile. 'Sir,' said Nevill, 'I am a practical man--a man of business. If I have fiction on hand, I go to a publisher and sell it. If I have truth on hand, I give it away to my friends. Truth fetches nothing in the market. Look at science. You can't make money out of science; and yet science is the only branch of human knowledge you can be sure of, for you can prove your work day by day. History is the greatest liar of all.' 'We are most anxious, sir,' said the solid man, 'to hear the remaining scientific facts of your remarkable voyage.' 'Oh, certainly. I immediately sang out! "All hands to let go sail! Let go all sail! Hard a-port, and let go the anchor!" There was nothing else for it. She might run over her anchor and drag and foul it; but what could one do? Now, sir, what would you have done in this case?' 'I should have drawn my feet out of the water at once, and taken off my boots and stockings.'