Whistlebinkie.

"Who, me?" asked the Unwiseman. "I wouldn't like it at all. I took precious good care that I shouldn't be neither."

"Nonsense," said Mollie. "How can you help yourself?"

"This way," said the Unwiseman with a proud smile of superiority, taking a bottle from his pocket. "See that?" he added.

"Yes," said Mollie. "What is it?"

"It's land, of course," replied the Unwiseman, holding the bottle up in the light. "Real land off my place at home. Just before I left the house it occurred to me that it would be pleasant to have some along and I took a shovel and went out and got a bottle full of it. It makes me feel safer to have the land in sight all the way over and then it will keep me from being homesick when I'm chasing those Alps down in Swazoozalum."

"Swizz-izzerland!" corrected Whistlebinkie.

"Swit-zer-land!" said Mollie for the instruction of both. "It's not Swazoozalum, or Swizziz-zerland, but Switzerland."

"O I see—rhymes with Hits-yer-land—when the Alp he hits your land, then you think of Switzerland—that it?" asked the Unwiseman.

"Well that's near enough," laughed Mollie. "But how does that bottle keep you from being homesick?"

"Why—when I begin to pine for my native land, all I've got to do is to open the bottle and take out a spoonful of it. 'This is my own, my native land,' the Poet said, and when I look at this bottle so say I. Right out of my own yard, too," said the Unwiseman, hugging the bottle tightly to his breast. "It's queer isn't it how I should find out how to travel so comfortably without having to ask anybody."

"I guess you're a genius," suggested Whistlebinkie.

"Maybe I am," agreed the Unwiseman, "but anyhow you know I just knew what to do as soon as I made up my mind to come along."

Mollie looked at him admiringly.

"Take these goloshes for instance. I'm the only person on board this boat that's got goloshes on," continued the old gentleman, "and yet if the boat went down, how on earth could they keep their feet dry? It's all so simple. Same way with this life preserver—it's nothing but an old bicycle tire I found in your barn, but just think what it would mean to me if I should fall overboard some day."

"Smitey-fine!" whistled Whistlebinkie.

"It is that. All I'll have to do is to sit inside of it and float till they lower a boat after me," said the Unwiseman.

"What have you done about getting sea-sick?" asked Mollie.

"Ah—that's the thing that bothered me as much as anything," ejaculated the Unwiseman, "but all of a sudden it came to me like a flash. I was getting my fishing tackle ready for the trip and when I came to the sinkers, there was the idea as plain as the nose on your face. Six days out, says I, means thirty-seven meals."

"Thirty-seven?" asked Mollie.

"Yes—three meals a day for six days is—," began the Unwiseman.

"Only eighteen," said Mollie, who for a child of her size was very quick at multiplication.

"So it is," said the Unwiseman, his face growing very red. "So it is. I must have forgotten to set down five and carry three."

"Looks that way," said Whistlebinkie, with a mirthful squeak through the top of his hat. "What you did was to set down three and carry seven."

"That's it," said the Unwiseman. "Three and seven make thirty-seven—don't it?"

"Looked at sideways," said Mollie, with a chuckle.

"I know I got it somehow," observed the Unwiseman, his smile returning. "So I prepared myself for thirty-seven meals. I brought a lead sinker along for each one of them. I'm going to tie one sinker to each meal to keep it down, and of course I won't be sea-sick at all. There was only one other way out of it that I could think of; that was to eat pound-cake all the time, but I was afraid maybe they wouldn't have any on board, so I brought the sinkers instead."

"It sounds like a pretty good plan," said Whistlebinkie. "Where's your State-room?"

"I haven't got one," said the Unwiseman. "I really don't need it, because I don't think I'll go to bed all the way across. I want to sit up and see the scenery. When you've only got a short time on the water and aren't likely to make a habit of crossing the ocean it's too bad to miss any of it, so I didn't take a room."

"I don't think there's much scenery to be seen on the ocean," suggested Mollie. "It's just plain water all the way over."

"O I don't think so," replied the Unwiseman. "I imagine from that story about Billy the Rover there's a lot of it. There's the Spanish main for instance. I want to keep a sharp look out for that and see how it differs from Bangor, Maine. Then once in a while you run across a latitude and a longitude. I've never seen either of those and I'm sort of interested to see what they look like. All I know about 'em is that one of 'em goes up and down and the other goes over and back—I don't exactly know how, but that's the way it is and I'm here to learn. I should feel very badly if we happened to pass either of 'em while I was asleep."

"Naturally," said Mollie.

"Then somewhere out here they've got a thing they call a horrizon, or a horizon, or something like that," continued the Unwiseman. "I've asked one of the sailors to point it out to me when we come to it, and he said he would. Funny thing about it though—he said he'd sailed the ocean for forty-seven years and had never got close enough to it to touch it. 'Must be quite a sight close to,' I said, and he said that all the horrizons he ever saw was from ten to forty miles off. There's a place out here too where the waves are ninety feet high; and then there's the Fishin' Banks—do you know I never knew banks ever went fishin', did you? Must be a funny sight to see a lot o' banks out fishin'. What State-room are you in, Mollie?"

"We've got sixty-nine," said Mollie.

"Sixty-nine," demanded the Unwiseman. "What's that mean?"

"Why it's the number of my room," explained Mollie.

"O," said the Unwiseman scratching his head in a puzzled sort of way. "Then you haven't got a State-room?"

"Yes," said Mollie. "It's a State-room."

"I don't quite see," said the Unwiseman, gazing up into the air. "If it's a State-room why don't they call it New Jersey, or Kansas, or Mitchigan, or some other State? Seems to me a State-room ought to be a State-room."

"I guess maybe there's more rooms on board than there are States," suggested Whistlebinkie. "There ain't more than sixty States, are there, Mollie?"

"There's only forty-six," said Mollie.

"Ah—then that accounts for number sixty-nine," observed the Unwiseman. "They're just keeping a lot of rooms numbered until there's enough States to go around."

"I hope we get over all right," put in Whistlebinkie, who wasn't very brave.

"O I guess we will," said the Unwiseman, cheerfully. "I was speaking to that sailor on that very point this morning, and he said the chances were that we'd go through all right unless we lost one of the screws."

"Screws?" inquired Whistlebinkie.

"Yes—it don't sound possible, but this ship is pushed through the water by a couple of screws fastened in back there at the stern. It's the screws sterning that makes the boat go," the Unwiseman remarked with all the pride of one who really knows what he is talking about. "Of course if one of 'em came unfastened and fell off we wouldn't go so fast and if both of 'em fell off we wouldn't go at all, until we got the sails up and the wind came along and blew us into port."

"Well I never!" said