l be in navigation. Your studies will be conducted here in the
chart-room, and I have very little doubt but that, if you are only half
as willing to learn as we are to teach, you will have made a
considerable amount of progress by the time that we arrive at Sydney;
indeed, as far as navigation is concerned, it is by no means an
intricate science, and there is no reason why you should not be a
skilled navigator by the time that we reach Australia."

Bob had the good sense to fully appreciate the immense value of the
advantages thus proffered to him. He was intelligent enough to at once
recognise the vast intellectual distance which intervened between
himself, a poor, ignorant fisher-lad, and the highly-educated men and
women who were to be found among the saloon passengers, as well as the
wide difference between his own awkward, embarrassed manner and the
quiet, easy, graceful demeanour which distinguished some of the
individuals to be seen daily on the poop of the _Galatea_. The sense of
his inferiority already weighed heavily upon him; the opportunity now
offered him of throwing it off was therefore eagerly and gratefully
accepted, and he at once plunged _con amore_ into the studies which were
marked out for him.

Mr Eastlake--the gentleman who had undertaken to remedy, as far as time
permitted, the serious defects in Bob's education--was exceptionally
well qualified for the task. Educated at Cambridge, where he had won a
double first; naturally studious, a great traveller, endowed with a
singularly happy knack of investing the driest subject with quite an
absorbing interest, and a perfect master in the art of instructing, he
superintended Bob's studies so effectively that the lad's progress was
little short of marvellous. Not content with the two hours of daily
tuition which had originally been proposed, Mr Eastlake frequently
joined the lad on the poop or in the waist for the first two or three
hours of the first night-watch, when the weather happened to be fine and
Bob's services were not particularly required, and, promenading fore and
aft with his pupil by his side, he was wont to launch into long and
interesting disquisitions upon such topics as were best calculated to
widen Bob's sphere of knowledge and cultivate his intellect.

Nor was Captain Staunton any less successful in that portion of Bob's
studies which he had undertaken to direct. Fortunately for our hero his
skipper was not one of those men who