Dick did not give his masters at school an especially easy time; there was, I fear, nothing of the saintly little boy about him; nor did any of them ever have reason to suspect him of any especial cleverness. He was a very ordinary, healthy youngster, unencumbered by much brain power. But he did respectably at school and more than respectably at sports, because he was quite unable to take things easily. There was in his nature a streak of keenness that made the pursuit of the moment the most interesting thing possible. He flung himself heart and soul and generally with all his alert young body, too, into all he did. Naturally, his very keenness often made him make mistakes; but at least it saved him from dullness. "He's a provoking little animal," a tired form-master once said of him; "but, thank goodness, he's no slug!"
Being so designed, partly by Nature and partly by parents who had themselves that strong quality of keenness, it may readily be imagined that a ship opened up to Dick a storehouse of novelty and opportunity. He made his way into every permitted corner, and since he did not do it bumptiously, he found a welcome where a cheeky youngster would have been promptly ejected. The chief engineer succumbed to the longing face at the entrance to his mysterious domain, and let him spend hours in the engine room, where the roar and beat of the mighty machinery was the purest music in Dick's ears. He penetrated even to the stokehold, where, stripped of his outer garments, he toiled eagerly with a stoker's shovel, flinging great lumps of coal into the yawning mouths of the furnaces, where the flames leaped redly. There was something in feeling that, even for a moment, he was helping the onward rush of the ship that brought him nearer to Fremantle and his father. He stopped only when he could no longer hold the heavy shovel, and the fourth engineer, laughing, hustled him from the stifling stokehold into the not particularly fresh air of the engine room, which seemed to Dick an ozone bath by comparison.
The men made him free of their quarters, and spun him long yarns of the sea, more or less true, while they taught him intricacies of splicing and knotting that are generally hidden from the landsman. They made him highly technical in speech, so that he would have shuddered at calling the companion a staircase, or in misusing such ordinary expressions as "abaft the binnacle." He saw their dim and smellful sleeping accommodation, and came away with his small soul full of wrath that men so admirable should be herded in dens so uninviting. They took care of him in more ways than one; he saw a sturdy apprentice roundly cuffed on the head for having made some remark in his presence of which the older men did not approve. Dick had not caught the remark--which was as well. It made him rather uncomfortable to see the boy cuffed, but having great respect for the cuffer, a boatswain of wonderful ability where knots were concerned, he took it for granted that everything was all right. He told them stories of station life in return for their sea yarns, and altogether spent some of his happiest hours in the fo'c'sle.