You can't be quite in your right senses about us; you must be--I don't mean to speak disrespectfully-what we call on shore, cracked about us....
'Doddered, don't they say in one of the shires ?' he remarked.
Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I appealed to his manliness.

Why should he take advantage of a couple of boys?
I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings: What misery were not our friends suffering now.

('Ay, a bucketful now saves an ocean in time to come!' he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more pathetic dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.
'Is that Latin or Greek ?' he asked.
I would not reply to the cold-blooded question.

He said the New Testament was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could read it in the original.
'Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship ?' said Temple, an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to the point than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thought so; however, I took it up:-- 'How can we be graduating for our sphere in life, Captain Welsh, on board your vessel?
Tell us that.' He played thumb and knuckles on his table.

Just when I was hoping that good would come of the senseless tune, Temple cried, 'Tell us what your exact intentions are, Captain Welsh.