"Come on, Joe!" "Hurry, Ed!" These commands were issued in no rough but always a sure way, and Joe and Ed came.

They looked up to Frank from the first as a master, and what he had to say was listened to eagerly.
He was forever pondering, pondering--one fact astonishing him quite as much as another--for he could not figure out how this thing he had come into--this life--was organized.

How did all these people get into the world?
What were they doing here?
Who started things, anyhow?
His mother told him the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn't believe it.

There was a fish-market not so very far from his home, and there, on his way to see his father at the bank, or conducting his brothers on after-school expeditions, he liked to look at a certain tank in front of one store where were kept odd specimens of sea-life brought in by the Delaware Bay fishermen.

He saw once there a sea-horse--just a queer little sea-animal that looked somewhat like a horse--and another time he saw an electric eel which Benjamin Franklin's discovery had explained.