people. They are also young, and therefore they are thoughtless
and cruel.

The respectful and sensible speeches which the old professors had
been making all the afternoon in honour of the explorers had come
to an end, and the procession of the students had started.

The leadsman and his sweetheart were sitting on a balcony in the
company of the other great men. The ringing of the church bells
and the booming of the guns mingled with the sound of the bugles
and the rolling of the drums; flags were waving and fluttering in
the breeze. And then the procession marched by.

It was headed by a ship, with sailors and everything else belonging
to it; next walruses came and polar bears, and all the rest of it;
then students in disguise, representing the heroes; the Great Man
himself was represented in his fur coat and goggles. It wasn't
quite respectful, of course; it wasn't a very great honour to be
impersonated in this way; but there it was! It was well meant, no
doubt. And gradually every member of the expedition passed by, one
after the other, all represented by the students.

Last of all came the leadsman. It was true, nobody could ever have
dreamt of calling him handsome, but there is no need for a man to
be handsome, as long as he is an able leadsman, or anything else
able. The students had chosen a hideous old grumbler to impersonate
him. That alone would not have mattered; but nature had made one of
his arms shorter than the other, and his representative had made
a feature of this defect. And that was too bad; for a defect is
something for which one ought not to be blamed.