“So you know Mart?  Lord alive, the way things come out!”

It was easy to see that Martin was not only his friend but his hero.  He talked of him with a passionate love and admiration with which men, whatever they feel, rarely speak of each other.

Martin was the salt of the earth.  He was the finest fellow and the staunchest friend and the bravest-hearted chap that walked under the stars of God.

“The greatest chum I have in the world, too, and by the holy Immaculate Mother I’m destroyed at being away from him.”

It was like music to hear him speak.  A flood of joy went sweeping through me at every word of praise he gave to Martin.  And yet—­I cannot explain why, unless it was the woman in me, the Irish-woman, or something like it—­but I began to depreciate Martin, in order to “hoosh” him on, so that he might say more on the same subject.

“Then he did take his degree,” I said.  “He was never very clever at his lessons, I remember, and I heard that he was only just able to scrape through his examinations.”

The young doctor fell to my bait like a darling.  With a flaming face and a nervous rush of racy words which made me think that if I closed my eyes I should be back on the steps of the church in Rome talking to Martin himself, he told me I was mistaken if I thought his friend was a numskull, for he had had “the biggest brain-pan in College Green,” and the way he could learn things when he wanted to was wonderful.

He might be a bit shaky in his spelling, and perhaps he couldn’t lick the world in Latin, but his heart was always in exploring, and the way he knew geography, especially the part of it they call the “Unknown,” the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and what Charcot had done there, and Biscoe and Bellamy and D’Urville and Greely and Nansen and Shackleton and Peary, was enough to make the provost and professors look like fools of the earth by the side of him.

“Why, what do you think?” said the doctor.  “When he went to London to apply for his billet, the Lieutenant said to him:  ’You must have been down there before, young man.’  ‘No such luck,’ said Martin.  ’But you know as much about the Antarctic already as the whole boiling of us put together,’ said the Lieutenant.  Yes, by St. Patrick and St. Thomas, he’s a geographer any way.”

I admitted that much, and to encourage the doctor to go on I told him where I had seen Martin last, and what he had said of his expedition.

“In Rome you say?” said the doctor, with a note of jealousy.  “You beat me there then.  I saw him off from London, though.  A few of us Dublin boys, being in town at the time, went down to Tilbury to see him sail, and when they were lifting anchor and the tug was hitching on, we stood on the pier—­sixteen strong—­and set up some of our college songs.  ’Stop your noising, boys,’ said he, ‘the Lieutenant will be hearing you.’  But not a bit of it.  We sang away as long as we could see him going out with the tide, and then we went back in the train, smoking our pipes like so many Vauxhall chimneys, and narra a word out of the one of us. . . .  Yes, yes, there are some men like that.  They come like the stars of night and go like the light of heaven.  Same as there are some women who walk the world like the sun, and leave the grass growing green wherever their feet have trod.”