He only stayed in long enough to sleep, to eat three meals a day, and to write letters to his father, mother, and Frank March, telling them of everything that was taking place.

The rest of the time he devoted to the boys--and the girls; for he was over at Captain May's house almost as much as he was at the Wings'.

He was enjoying himself immensely, though it didn't seem as though he was doing much except to talk.
If he went fishing with the boys, they would make him tell how he and Frank caught the alligator, or how the alligator caught Frank, and how he killed it; and when he finished it was time to go home, and none of them had even thought of fishing since Mark began to talk.
There was nothing the boys enjoyed more than going out into the woods, making believe that some of the great spreading oaks were palm-trees, and lying down under them and listening, while Mark, at their earnest request, told over and over again the stories of the wreck on the Florida reef, and the picnic his father and mother and Ruth and he had under the palm-trees, or of hunting deer at night through the solemn, moss-hung, Southern forests, or of the burning of the Wildfire.
"I say, Mark," exclaimed Tom Ellis, after listening with breathless interest to one of these stories, "you're a regular book, you are, and I'd rather hear you tell stories than to read Captain Marryat or Paul du Chaillu." But there was one story Mark never would tell.

It was that of his terrible experience in the buried river.

Of this he tried to think as little as possible, and when the boys saw that it really distressed him to talk of it they forbore to urge him to do so.
Of course Ruth did not feel as Mark did about it, and she told the story many times, and everybody who heard it declared it was a most wonderful experience.