Chief among these was our gardener, old Tommy the Mate, who lived in a
mud cabin on the shore and passed the doctor's house on his way to work.
Long ago Tommy had told the boy a tremendous story. It was about Arctic
exploration and an expedition he had joined in search of Franklin. This
had made an overpowering impression on Martin, who for mouths afterwards
would stand waiting at the gate until Tommy was going by, and then say:

"Been to the North Pole to-day, Tommy?"

Whereupon Tommy's "starboard eye" would blink and he would answer:

"Not to-day boy. I don't go to the North Pole more nor twice a day now."

"Don't you, though?" the boy would say, and this would happen every
morning.

But later on Martin conceived the idea that the North Pole was the
locality immediately surrounding his father's house, and every day he
would set out on voyages of exploration over the garden, the road and
the shore, finding, by his own account, a vast world of mysterious
things and undiscovered places. By some means--nobody knew how--the boy
who could not learn his lessons studied his father's German atlas, and
there was not a name in it north of Spitzbergen which he had not got by
heart. He transferred them all to Ellan, so that the Sky Hill became
Greenland, and the Black Head became Franz Josef Land, and the Nun's
Well became Behring Strait, and Martha's Gullet became New Siberia, and
St. Mary's Rock, with the bell anchored on it, became the pivot of the
earth itself.