"In what way will going whaling with Captain Brown and your important self advance my fortunes ?" "Listen," said the other, "and I'll soon tell you.

Do you recollect when I was recounting my story, that after I was picked up from the boat and taken on board the _Pilot's Bride_, I mentioned the fact of the ship calling at Tristan d'Acunha ?" "Yes; and you also said that you would inform me of something important about the place `bye-and-bye,' if you alluded then to what you're going to tell me now." "Precisely, `bye-and-bye' is `now,'" said Eric, laughing again and tossing his mane-like hair back from his forehead in the old fashion.
"We landed at Tristan d'Acunha--" "Where on earth is that place ?" interrupted Fritz.

"I've a confused notion that it is an island of some sort; but, in what precise spot it is situated, I'm sure I can't tell!" "Well, then," commenced Eric grandiloquently--only too glad of the opportunity of having to instruct his elder brother, who had been regarded in the family circle as the centre of all wisdom--"`Tristan d'Acunha' is the centre island of a group, so-called after the Portuguese navigator who discovered them in the early beginning of the sixteenth century.

The islands are probably the most isolated and remote of all the abodes of men, lying as they do almost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and nearly equidistant from the continents of America and Africa; for, they are situated nearly on the line that could be drawn between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope--from the latter of which they are distant some fifteen hundred miles in a westerly direction, while Saint Helena, the nearest other land to them on the north, is thirteen hundred miles away." "You're very explicit, I'm sure," said Fritz in a chaffing way; "you must have been coaching up your geography recently." "I disdain vulgar interruption and idle clamour," returned the other in a similar vein.

"But, to proceed.