"I won't become a clod-hopper," I exclaimed, seeing the dreary, endless monotony of such a life.

"But it will do you good. It will be a fine experience for you."

"If it's such a fine experience why don't you go and do it?"

"I won't stand any nonsense."

"I'd rather die.... I'm going to die anyhow."

"Yes, if you don't do what I tell you."

"I won't."

"We'll see."

"Very well, father, we will see."

"If you weren't such a sick kid I'd trounce you."

* * * * *

You could approach Antonville by surrey, buggy or foot ... along a winding length of dusty road ... or muddy ... according to rain or shine.

My Uncle Beck drove me out in a buggy.

Aunt Alice, so patient-faced and pretty and sweet-eyed in her neat poverty—greeted me with a warm kiss.

"Well, you'll soon be well now."

"But I won't work on a farm."

"Never mind, dear ... don't worry about that just yet."

* * * * *

That afternoon I sat with Aunt Alice in the kitchen, watching her make bread. Everyone else was out: Uncle Beck, on a case ... Cousin Anders, over helping with the harvest on a neighbouring farm ... Cousin Anna was also with the harvesters, helping cook for the hands ... for the Doctor's family needed all the outside money they could earn.

For Uncle Beck was a dreamer. He thought more of his variorum Shakespeare than he did of his medical practice. And he was slow-going and slow-speaking and so conscientious that he told patients the truth ... all which did not help him toward success and solid emolument. He would take eggs in payment for his visits ... or jars of preserves ... or fresh meat, if the farmer happened to be slaughtering.

* * * * *

"Where's Granma?" I asked Aunt Alice, as she shoved a batch of bread in the oven.

"She's out Halton way ... she'll go crazy with joy when she gets word you're back home. She'll start for here right off as soon as she hears the news. She's visiting with Lan and his folks."

When I heard Lan mentioned I couldn't help giving a savage look.

Aunt Alice misinterpreted.

"What, Johnnie—won't you be glad to see her!... you ought to ... she's said over and over again that she loved you more than she did any of her own children."

"It isn't that—I hate Landon. I wish he was dead or someone would kill him for me."

"Johnnie, you ought to forgive and forget. It ain't Christian."

"I don't care. I'm not a Christian."

"O Johnnie!" shocked ... then, after a pause of reproach which I enjoyed—"your Uncle Lan's toned down a lot since then ... married ... has four children ... one every year." And Alice laughed whimsically.

"—and he's stopped gambling and drinking, and he's got a good job as master-mechanic in a factory....

"He was young ... he was only a boy in the days when he whipped you."

"Yes, and I suppose I was old?... I tell you, Aunt Alice, it's something I can't forget ... the dirty coward," and I swore violently, forgetting myself.

At that moment Uncle Beck appeared suddenly at the door, back from a case.

"Here, here, that won't do! I don't allow that kind of language in my household." And he gave me a severe and admonishing look before going off on another and more urgent call that waited him.

* * * * *

"And how's Granma been getting on?"

"—aging rapidly ... " a pause, " ... hasn't got either of the two houses on Mansion Avenue now ... sold them and divided the money among her children ... gave us some ... and Millie ... and Lan ... wouldn't hear of 'no' ... " parenthetically, "Uncle Joe didn't need any; he's always prospered since the early days, you know."

"And what's Granma up to these days?" For she was always doing sweet, ignorant, childish, impractical things.

"—spirit-rapping is it? or palmistry? or magnetic healing? or what?"

"You'll laugh!"

"Tell me!"

"She's got a beau."

"What? a beau? and she eighty if a day!"

"Yes, we—all her children—think it's absurd. And we're all trying to advise her against it ... but she vows she's going to get married to him anyhow."

"And who is her 'fellow'"?

"—a one-legged Civil War veteran ... a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Snyder ... owns a house near Beaver Falls ... draws a pension ... he's a jolly old apple-cheeked fellow ... there's no doubt they love each other ... only—only it seems rather horrible for two people as old as they are to go and get married like two young things ... and really fall in love, too!"

I was silent ... amused ... interested ... then—"well, Granma'll tell me all about it when she comes ... and I can judge for myself, and," I added whimsically, "I suppose if they love each other it ought to be all right."

And we both laughed.

* * * * *

When Granma heard I was West she couldn't reach Antonville fast enough. She was the same dear childlike woman, only incredibly older-looking. Age seemed to have fallen on her like an invading army, all at once. Her hair was, every shred of it, not only grey, but almost white. There shone the same patient, sweet, ignorant, too-trusting eyes ... there was the blue burst of vein on her lower lip.

After she had kissed and kissed me, stroked and stroked my head and face in speechless love, I looked at her intently and lied to please her:

"Why, Granma, you don't look a day older."

"But I am, Johnnie, I am. I've been working hard since you left." As if she had not worked hard before I left ... she informed me that, giving away to her children what she had received for the sale of her two houses (that never brought her anything because of her simplicity, while they were in her possession) she had grown tired of "being a burden to them," as she phrased it, and had hired herself out here and there as scrubwoman, washerwoman, housekeeper, and what not....

Later I learned that nothing could be done with her, she was so obstinate. She had broken away despite the solicitude of all her children—who all loved her and wanted her to stay with them.

At last she had answered an advertisement for a housekeeper ... that appeared in a farm journal ... and so she had met her old cork-legged veteran, whom she now had her mind set on marrying.

"But Granma, to get married at your age?"

"I'd like to ask why not?" she answered sweetly, "I feel as young as ever when it comes to men ... and the man ... you wait till you see him ... you'll like him ... he's such a good provider, Johnnie; he draws a steady pension of sixty dollars a month from the Government, and he'll give me a good home."

"But any of my aunts and uncles would do the same."

"Yes, Johnnie, but it ain't the same as having a man of your own around ... there's nothing like that, Johnnie, for a woman."

"But your own children welcome you and treat you well?"

"Oh, yes, Johnnie, my little boy, but in spite of that, I feel in the way. And, no matter how much they love me, it's better for me to have a home of my own and a man of my own."

"Besides, Billy loves me so much," she continued, wistfully, "and even though he's seventy whereas I'm eighty past, he says his being younger don't make no difference ... and he's always so jolly ... always laughing and joking."

* * * * *

"We must begin to allow for Granma," Aunt Alice told me, "she's coming into her second childhood."

* * * * *

Granma believed thoroughly in my aspirations to become a poet. With great delight she retailed incidents of my childhood, reminding me of a thousand youthful escapades of which she constituted me the hero, drawing therefrom auguries of my future greatness.

One of the incidents which alone sticks in my memory:

"Do you 'mind,'" she would say, "how you used to follow Millie about when she papered the pantry shelves with newspapers with scalloped edges? and how you would turn the papers and read them, right after her, as she laid them down, and make her frantic?"

"Yes," I would respond, highly gratified with the anecdote, "and you would say, Oh, Millie, don't get mad at the little codger, some day he might turn out to be a great man!'"

* * * * *

Uncle Beck had a fine collection of American Letters. I found a complete set of Hawthorne and straightway became a moody and sombre Puritan ... and I wrote in Hawthornian prose, quaint essays and stories. And I lived in a world of old lace and lavender, of crinoline and brocade.

And then I discovered my uncle's books on gynecology and obstetrics ... full of guilty fevers I waited until he had gone out on a call and then slunk into his office to read....

One afternoon my doctor-uncle came suddenly upon me, taking me unaware.

* * * * *

"Johnnie, what are you up to?"

"—was just reading your medical books."

"Come over here," already seated at his desk, on his swivel-chair, he motioned me to a seat.

"Sit down!"

I obeyed him in humiliated silence.

He rose and closed the door, hanging the sign "Busy" outside.

* * * * *

At last I learned about myself and about life.

* * * * *

The harvesting over, Anders began to chum with me. We took long walks together, talking of many things ... but, chiefly, of course, of those things that take up the minds of adolescents ... of the mysteries of creation, of life at its source ... of why men and women are so ... and I took it for granted, after he confessed that he had fallen into the same mistakes as I, suffering similar agonies, that he had been set right by his father, the doctor, as I just had. I was surprised to find he had not. So I shared with him the recent knowledge I had acquired.

* * * * *

"And you mean to tell me that Uncle Beck has said nothing to you?"

"Not a single word ... never."

"But why didn't you ask him then ... him being a doctor?"

"How can a fellow talk with his father about such things?"

"It's funny to me he didn't inform you, anyhow."

"I was his son, you see!"

* * * * *

Anders had a girl, he told me, confidingly. She was off on a visit to Mornington, at present ... a mighty pretty little girl and the best there was....

* * * * *

"By the way, Anders, do you know second cousin Phoebe at all?"

"Sure thing I know her ... the last time I heard of her ... which was almost a year ago—she was wilder than ever."

"How do you mean, Anders?"

"Her folks couldn't keep her in of nights ... a gang of boys and girls would come and whistle for her, and she'd get out, sooner or later, and join them."

"I tell you what," I began, in an unpremeditated burst of invention, which I straightway believed, it so appealed to my imagination, "I've never told anybody before, but all these years I've been desperately in love with Phoebe."

Anders scrutinised me quizzically, then the enthusiasm of the actor in my face made him believe me....

"Well, no matter how bad she is, she certainly was a beaut, the last time I saw her."

"I'm going," I continued "(you mustn't tell anybody), I'm going down to Aunt Rachel's, after I leave here, and get Phoebe." And eagerly and naively we discussed the possibilities as we walked homeward....

* * * * *

After my talk with Uncle Beck all my morbidity began to melt away, and, growing better in mind, my body grew stronger ... he wrote to my father that it was not consumption ... so now I was turning my coming West into a passing visit, instead of a long enforced sojourn there for the good of my health.

* * * * *

I found different household arrangements on revisiting Aunt Rachel and her household.

For one thing, the family had moved into town ... Newcastle ... and they had a fine house to live in, neat and comfortable. Gone was that atmosphere of picturesque, pioneer poverty. Though, to be sure, there sat Josh close up against the kitchen stove, as of old. For the first sharp days of fall were come ... he was spitting streams of tobacco, as usual.

"I hate cities," was his first greeting to me. He squirted a brown parabola of tobacco juice, parenthetically, into the wood-box behind the stove, right on top of the cat that had some kittens in there.

Aunt Rachel caught him at it.

"Josh, how often have I told you you mustn't spit on that cat."

"'Scuse me, Ma, I'm kind o' absint-minded."

The incident seemed to me so funny that I laughed hard. Aunt Rachel gave me a quiet smile.

"Drat the boy, he's allus findin' somethin' funny about things!"

This made me laugh more. But I had brought Uncle Josh a big plug of tobacco, and he was placated, ripping off a huge chew as soon as he held it in his hands.

The great change I have just spoken of came over the family because Phoebe's two sisters, Jessie and Mona—who had been off studying to be nurses, now had come back, and, taking cases in town, they were making a good living both for themselves and the two old folks....

I had learned from Uncle Beck, as he drove me in to Mornington, that, the last he heard of Phoebe, she was working out as a maid to "some swells," in that city.

* * * * *

"Damme, ef I don't hate cities an' big towns," ejaculated Uncle Josh, breaking out of a long, meditative silence, "you kain't keep no dogs there ... onless they're muzzled ... and no ferrets, neither ... and what 'ud be the use if you could?... there ain't nothin' to hunt anyhow ... wisht we lived back on thet old muddy hilltop agin."

* * * * *

Supper almost ready ... the appetizing smell of frying ham—there's nothing, being cooked, smells better....

Paul came in from work ... was working steady in the mills now, Aunt Rachel had informed me.

Paul came in without a word, his face a mask of such empty hopelessness that I was moved by it deeply.

"Paul, you mustn't take on so. It ain't right nor religious," said Uncle Josh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe ... he smoked and chewed in relays. Paul replied nothing.

"Come on, folks," put in Rachel, "supper's ready ... draw your chairs up to the table."

We ate our supper under a quiet, grey mood. An air of tragedy seemed to hang over us ... for the life of me I couldn't understand what had become of Paul's good-natured, rude jocosity. Why he had grown into a silent, sorrowful man....

* * * * *

"You kin bunk up with Paul to-night, Johnnie," announced Rachel, when it came bedtime.

Paul had already slunk off to bed right after supper. It was dark in the room when I got there.

"Paul, where's the light?"

"—put it out ... like to lie in the dark an' think," answered a deep, sepulchral voice.

"Whatever is the matter with you, Paul?"

"Ain't you heered? Ain't Ma told you?"

"No!"

Paul struck a match and lit the lamp. I sat on the side of the bed and talked with him.

"Ain't you heered how I been married?" he began.

"So that's it, is it?" I anticipated prematurely, "and you weren't happy ... and she went off and left you!"

"Yes, she's left me all right, Johnnie, but not that way ... she's dead!"

And Paul stopped with a sob in his throat. I didn't know what to say to his sudden declaration, so I just repeated foolishly, "why, I never knew you got married!" twice.

"Christ, Johnnie, she was the best little woman in the world—such a little creature, Johnnie ... her head didn't more'n come up to under my armpits."

There followed a long silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow, drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, "Christ, but she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I wish you'd 'a' knowed her."

At last I ventured, "and how—how did she come to die?"

"—baby killed her, she was that small ... she was like a little girl ... she oughtn't to of had no baby at all, doctor said...."

"I killed her, Johnnie," he cried in agony, "and that's the God's truth of it."

Another long silence.

The lamp guttered but didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney, was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to the floor....

"But the baby?—it lived?"

"Yes, it lived ... a girl ... if it hadn't of lived ... if it had gone, too, I wouldn't of wanted to live, either!..."

"That's why I'm workin' so hard, these days, with no lay-offs fer huntin' or fishin' or anything."

* * * * *

The next day I learned more from Rachel of how Paul had agonized over the death of his tiny wife ... "'she was that small you had a'most to shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say," said Rachel gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a year, the baby whose birth had killed its mother.

"At last he's gittin' a little cheer in his face. But every so often the gloomy fit comes over him like it did last night at supper. I keep tellin' him it ain't Christian, with her dead two years a'ready—but he won't listen ... he's got to have his fit out each time."

* * * * *

As if this had not been enough of the tragic, the next day when I asked about Phoebe, Aunt Rachel started crying.

"Phoebe's gone, too," she sobbed.

"O, Aunt Rachel, I'm so sorry ... but I didn't know ... nobody told me."

"That's all right, Johnnie. Somehow it relieves me to talk about Phoebe." She rose from her rocker, laid down her darning, and went to a dresser in the next room. She came out again, holding forth to me a picture ... Phoebe's picture....

A shy, small, oval, half-wild face like that of a dryad's. Her chin lifted as if she were some wood-creature listening to the approaching tread of the hunter and ready on the instant to spring forth and run along the wind....

An outdoor picture, a mere snapshot, but an accidental work of art.

Voluminous leafage blew behind and above her head, splashed with the white of sunlight and the gloom of swaying shadow.

"Why, she's—she's beautiful!"

"Yes—got prettier and prettier every time you looked at her...."

"But," and Aunt Rachel sighed, "I couldn't do nothin' with her at all. An' scoldin' an' whippin' done no good, neither. Josh useter whip her till he was blue in the face, an' she wouldn't budge. Only made her more sot and stubborner....

"—guess she was born the way she was ... she never could stay still a minute ... always fidgettin' ... when she was a little girl, even—I used to say, 'Now, look here, Phoebe,' I'd say, 'your ma 'ull give you a whole dime all at once if you'll set still jest for five minutes in that chair.' An' she'd try ... and, before sixty seconds was ticked off she'd be on her feet, sayin', 'Ma, I guess you kin keep that dime.'

"When she took to runnin' out at nights," my great-aunt continued, in a low voice, "yes, an' swearin' back at her pa when he gave her a bit of his mind, it nigh broke my heart ... and sometimes she'd see me cryin', and that would make her feel bad an' she'd quiet down fer a few days ... an' she'd say, 'Ma, I'm goin' to be a good girl now,' an' fer maybe two or three nights she'd help clean up the supper-things—an' then—" with a breaking voice, "an' then all at once she'd scare me by clappin' both hands to that pretty brown head o' hers, in sech a crazy way, an' sayin', 'Honest, Ma, I can't stand it any longer ... this life's too slow.... I've gotta go out where there's some life n' fun!'

"It was only toward the last that she took to sneakin' out after she pretended to go to bed.. gangs of boys an' girls, mixed, would come an' whistle soft fer her, under the window ... an' strange men would sometimes hang aroun' the house ... till Josh went out an' licked a couple.

"It drove Josh nigh crazy.

"One evenin', after this had gone on a long time, Josh ups an' says, 'Ma, Phoebe's run complete out o' hand ... she'll hafta be broke o' this right now ... when she comes back to-night I'm going to give her the lickin' of her life.'

"'Josh, you mustn't whip her. Let's both have a long talk with her. (I knowed Josh 'ud hurt her bad if he whipped her. He has a bad temper when he is het up.) Maybe goin' down on our knees with her an' prayin' might do some good.'"

"'No, Ma, talkin' nor prayin' won't do no good ... the only thing left's a good whippin' to straighten her out.'"

"O Aunt Rachel," I cried, all my desire of Phoebe breaking but into tenderness. I looked at the lovely face, crossed with sunlight, full of such quick intelligence, such mischievousness....

You can catch a wild animal in a trap, but to whip it would be sacrilege ... that might do for domesticated animals.

"Josh never laid a hand on her, though, that night ... she never came home ... men are so awful in their pride, Johnnie ... don't you be like that when you grow to be a man...."

Then Aunt Rachel said no more, as Paul came in at that moment. Nor did she resume the subject.

* * * * *

Next morning I packed away to visit Uncle Lan. I might as well go, even if I hated him. It would be too noticeable, not to go.

He was at the train, waiting for me. He proffered me his hand. To my surprise, I took it. He seized my grip from me, put his other hand affectionately on my shoulder.

"I've often wondered whether you'd ever forgive me for the way I beat you.... I've learned better since."

Before I knew it my voice played me the trick of saying yes, I forgave him.

"That's a good boy!" and Lan gave my hand such a squeeze that it almost made me cry out with the pain of it.

* * * * *

"Lan," as we walked along, "can you tell me more about Phoebe.... Aunt Rachel told me some, but—"

"Oh, she ended up by running away with a drummer ... she hadn't been gone long when her ma got word from her asking her to forgive her ... that she'd run off with a man she loved, and was to be married to him pretty soon.... Phoebe gave no address, but the letter had a Pittsburgh postmark....

"A month ... six months went by. Then a letter came in a strange hand. The girl that wrote it said that she was Phoebe's 'Roommate.'" Lan paused here, and gave me a significant look, then resumed:

"Paul went down to bring the body home, and found she'd been buried already. They were too poor to have it dug up and brought home."

"It seems that the man that took Phoebe off was nothing but a pimp!"

* * * * *

Suicide: early one Sunday morning; early, for girls of their profession, the two girls, Phoebe and her roommate were sitting in their bedrooms in kimonos.

"What a nice Sunday," Phoebe had said, looking out at the window. "Jenny," she continued to her roommate, "I have a feeling I'd like to go to church this morning...."

Jenny had thought that was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....

Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it being Sunday morning. She'd bring in a Sunday paper, too.

When she returned, Phoebe didn't seem to be in the room. Jenny felt that something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....

She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....

She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed. Her eyes were rolled back to the whites from agony. A creamy froth was on her mouth. And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole damn bottle of it.

Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name—loud.... "Phoebe, why don't you speak to me!" Took her head in her lap and it only lolled. Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole house up. And the madame had shouted:

"Shut up, you bitch, do you want people to think someone's gettin' killed? Ain't we in bad enough already?"

"So Phoebe came to a bad end," commented Lan, "as we always thought she would."

* * * * *

The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon:

Once, in the night, during my week's stay with him, I stepped from bed, sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay. Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him through the heart with.

But I bumped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave me a bump as big as a hen's egg, into the bargain.

The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.

"—that you, Johnnie?" called my uncle.

"Yep!"

"What's the matter? can't you sleep?"

"No!—got up to take a drink of water."

"You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed." A pause. He continued: "You must of run into something. I heard a bang."

"I did. I bumped my head into the door."

* * * * *

I visited Aunt Millie last.

I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.

Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile ... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.

Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being adored in turn by them.

It was "Ma!" here and "Ma!" there ... the voices of the children ever calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters, baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking, talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....

Uncle Dick loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales....

Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me, with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....

* * * * *

But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my desire to die a poet, and young.... Principal Balling had me come to see him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that, from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to pass in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me, before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special student at the Keeley Heights High School.

The one thing High School gave me—my Winter there—was Shelley. In English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his Skylark. It was his Ode to the West Wind that made me want more of him ... with his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising the world.

I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced, modern one—as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged behind her glasses at me—to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great books as I did.

Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do in the Ode to the Nightingale and in the Epipsychidion....

Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's Tramping With Tramps,—and one other—Two Years Before the Mast, by Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests, little towns on river-bends.

A tramp or sailor—which?

First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and back again?

Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett and Fielding?

It took me days of talk with the gang—boasting—and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch.

Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New York waterfront that same afternoon....

I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.

Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Caesar and Vergil in the Latin, Young's Night Thoughts, and Shelley.

* * * * *

South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts dizzy things to look up at.

I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side. First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft. And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft. I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.

"Hey, Jimmy," I shouted to the boy.

"Hey, yourself!" he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then, "what do ye want?"

"To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?"

He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.

"You go to hell!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin, whistling.

The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.

Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.

I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he wore ... an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young, straight-seeing, blue eyes.

When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley and reached me a stool to sit on.

"The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night. You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his bunk and eaten his breakfast."

The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a pail of potatoes....

Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked mostly of the women who had been in love with him ... slews of them ... "and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I want to ... I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was crazy about me ... that was only two years ago."

He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world, that had "gone mad about him" ... obviously, they were all prostitutes. He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.

It was a German ship—the Valkyrie. But the cook spoke excellent English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all but one or two of the crew.

Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.

* * * * *

"There's the captain now!"

A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck, looking down over the dock.

I started aft.

"Hist!" the cook motioned me back mysteriously. "Be sure you say 'Sir' to him frequently."

* * * * *

"Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?" (the cook had told me the captain's name).

"Yes. What do you want?"

"I've heard you needed a cabin boy."

"Are you of German descent?"

"No, sir."

"What nationality are you, then?"

"American, sir."

"That means nothing, what were your people?"

"Straight English on my mother's side ... Pennsylvania Dutch on my father's."

"What a mixture!"

He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.

"Do you think you could use me, sir?"

He swung on me abruptly.

"In what capacity?"

"As anything ... I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if necessary."

He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.

"Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to make a shadow ... you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea ... but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning till nine or ten at night?"

"Anything, to get to sea, sir!"

"—sure you haven't run away from home?"

"No-no, sir!"

"Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good enough?"

I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of sea-life, travel, and adventure.

"You talk just like one of our German poets."

"I am a poet," I ventured further.

The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.

"To-morrow morning at four o'clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before the mast."

* * * * *

I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house ... he was the uncle that had come east, years before. He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived in a flat in the Bronx.

He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he came home from work, that evening....

I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied. But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim's....

Then he began laughing at me.

"You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you make up ... I suppose this is one of them."

"Let the boy alone," my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and English ancestry, "you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day."

* * * * *

"Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But you can't be all balloon and no ballast."

They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ... Aunt Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she had run a dressmaking establishment.

Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for me.

"I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour to make your hypothetical ship in ... you'll have to jump up and stop the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do."

* * * * *

My first morning on shipboard was spent scrubbing cabin floors, washing down the walls, washing dishes, waiting on the captain and mates' mess ... the afternoon, polishing brass on the poop and officers' bridge, under the supervision of Karl, the former cabin boy.

"Well, how do you like it?" asked the cook, as he stirred something in a pot, with a big wooden ladle.

"Fine! but when are we sailing?"

"In about three days we drop down to Bayonne for a cargo of White Rose oil and then we make a clean jump for Sydney, Australia."

"Around Cape Horn?" I asked, stirred romantically at the thought.

"No. Around the Cape of Good Hope."

* * * * *

Early in the afternoon of the day before we left the dock, as I was polishing brass on deck, my father appeared before me, as abruptly as a spirit.

"Well, here he is, as big as life!"

"Hello, Pop!"

I straightened up to ease a kink in my back.

"You had no need to hide this from me, son; I envy you, that's all, I wish I wasn't too old to do it, myself ... this beats travelling about the country, selling goods as a salesman. It knocks my dream of having a chicken farm all hollow, too...."

He drew in a deep breath of the good, sunny harbour air. Sailors were up aloft, they were singing. The cook was in his galley, singing too. There were gulls glinting about in the sun.

"Of course you know I almost made West Point once ... had the appointment ... if it hadn't been for a slight touch of rheumatism in the joints ..." he trailed off wistfully.

"We've never really got to know each other, Johnnie."

I looked at him. "No, we haven't."

"I'm going to start you out right. Will the captain let you off for a while?"

"The cook's my boss ... as far as my time is concerned. I'm cabin boy."

My father gave the cook a couple of big, black cigars. I was allowed shore leave till four o'clock that afternoon....

"—you need a little outfitting," explained my father, as we walked along the dock to the street....

"I've saved up a couple of hundred dollars, which I drew out before I came over."

"But, Father...."

"You need a lot of things. I'm going to start you off right. While you were up in the cabin getting ready to go ashore I had a talk with the cook.... I sort o' left you in his charge—"

"But I don't want to be left in anyone's charge."

"—found out from him just what you'd need and now we're going to do a little shopping."

I accompanied my father to a seamen's outfitting place, and he spent a good part of his two hundred buying needful things for me ... shirts of strong material ... heavy underwear ... oilskins ... boots ... strong thread and needles ... and a dunnage bag to pack it all away in....

* * * * *

We stood together on the after-deck again, my father and I.

"Now I must be going," he remarked, trying to be casual. He put a ten dollar bill in my hand.

"—to give the boys a treat with," he explained ... "there's nothing like standing in good with an outfit you're to travel with ... and here," he was rummaging in his inside pocket ... "put these in your pocket and keep them there ... a bunch of Masonic cards of the lodge your daddy belongs to ... if you ever get into straits, you'll stand a better chance of being helped, as son of a Mason."

"No, Father," I replied, seriously and unhumorously, "I can't keep them."

"I'd like to know why not?"

"I want to belong to the brotherhood of man, not the brotherhood of the Masons."

He looked puzzled for a moment, then his countenance cleared.

"That's all right, Son ... you just keep those cards. They might come in handy if you find yourself stranded anywhere."

When my father turned his back, with a thought almost prayerful to the spirit of Shelley, I flung the Masonic cards overboard.

* * * * *

After dusk, the crew poured en masse to the nearest waterfront saloon with me. The ten dollars didn't last long.

* * * * *

"His old man has lots of money."

* * * * *

Our last night at the pier was a night of a million stars.

The sailmaker, with whom I had become well acquainted, waddled up to me. He was bow-legged. He waddled instead of walked. We sat talking on the foreward hatch....

"I'm glad we're getting off to-morrow," I remarked.

"—we might not. We lack a man for the crew yet."

"—thought we had the full number?"

"We did. But one of the boys in your party strayed away ... went to another saloon and had a few more drinks ... and someone stuck him with a knife in the short ribs ... he's in the hospital."

"But can't Captain Schantze pick up another man right away?"

"The consulate's closed till ten to-morrow morning. We're to sail at five ... so he can't sign on a new sailor before ... of course he might shanghai someone ... but the law's too severe these days ... and the Sailors' Aid Society is always on the job ... it isn't like it used to be."

* * * * *

But in spite of what the sailmaker had told me, the captain decided to take his chance, rather than delay the time of putting forth to sea. Around ten o'clock, in the full of the moon, a night-hawk cab drew up alongside the ship where she lay docked, and out of it jumped the first mate and the captain with a lad who was so drunk or drugged, or both, that his legs went down under him when they tried to set him on his feet.

They tumbled him aboard, where he lay in an insensate heap, drooling spit and making incoherent, bubbling noises.

Without lifting an eyebrow in surprise, the sailmaker stepped forward and joined the mate in jerking the man to his feet. The captain went aft as if it was all in the day's work.

The mate and the sailmaker jerked the shanghaied man forward and bundled him into a locker where bits of rope and nautical odds and-ends were piled, just forward of the galley.

* * * * *

In the sharp but misty dawn we cast our moorings loose. A busy little tug nuzzled up to take us in tow for open sea.

We were all intent on putting forth, when a cry came from the port side. The shanghaied man had broken out, and came running aft ... he stopped a moment, like a trapped animal, to survey the distance between the dock and the side ... measuring the possibilities of a successful leap.

By this time the first and second mates were after him, with some of the men ... he ran forward again, doubled in his tracks like a schoolboy playing tag ... we laughed at that, it was so funny the way he went under the mate's arm ... the look of surprise on the mate's face was funny ... Then the man who was pursued, in a flash, did a hazardous thing ... he flung himself in the air, over the starboard side, and took a long headlong tumble into the tugboat....

* * * * *

He was tied like a hog, and hauled up by a couple of ropes, the sailmaker singing a humorous chantey that made the boys laugh, as they pulled away.

* * * * *

This delayed the sailing anyhow. The mist had lifted like magic, and we were not far toward Staten Island before we knew a fine, blowing, clear day, presided over, in the still, upper spaces, by great, leaning cumulus clouds. They toppled huge over the great-clustered buildings as we trod outward toward the harbour mouth....

The pilot swung aboard. The voyage was begun.

The coast of America now looked more like a low-lying fringe of insubstantial cloud than solid land.

My heart sank. I had committed myself definitely to a three-months' sea-trip ... there was no backing out, it was too far to swim ashore.

"What's wrong, Johann," asked the captain, "are you sea-sick already?" He had noticed my expression as he walked by.

"No, sir!"

"If you are, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. I've known old sea-captains who got sea-sick every time they put out of port."

* * * * *

There was a running forward. The shanghaied man hove in sight, on the rampage again. He came racing aft. "I must speak with the captain."

There was a scuffle. He broke away. Again the two mates were close upon him. Suddenly he flung himself down and both the mates tripped over him and went headlong.

The captain couldn't help laughing. Then he began to swear ... "that fellow's going to give us a lot of trouble," he prophesied.

Several sailors, grinning, had joined in the chase. They had caught the fellow and were dragging him forward by the back and scruff of the neck, while he deliberately hung limp and let his feet drag as if paralysed from the waist down.

The captain stood over the group, that had come to a halt below. The captain was in good humour.

"Bring him up here."

The shanghaied man stood facing Schantze, with all the deference of a sailor, yet subtly defiant.

The captain began to talk in German.

"I don't speak German," responded the sailor stubbornly.

Yet it was in German that he had called out he must see the captain.

This did not make the captain angry. Instead, like a vain boy, he began in French....

"I don't speak French ..." again objected the sailor, still in English.

"Very well, we'll speak in English, then ... bring him down into the cabin ..." to the men and mates ... To the sailor again, "Come on, Englishman! (in derision), and we'll sign you on in the ship's articles."

They haled him below. The captain dismissed the sailors. The captain, the two mates and I, were alone with the mutineer.... I stepped into the pantry, pretending to be busy with the dishes. I didn't want to miss anything.

"Now," explained the captain, "what's happened has happened ... it's up to you to make the best of it ... we had to shanghai you," and he explained the case in full ... and if he would behave and do his share of the work with the rest of the crew, he would be treated decently and be paid ... and let go, if he wished, when the Valkyrie reached Sydney....

"Now sign," commanded the mate, "I never heard of a man in your fix ever being treated so good before."

"But I won't sign."

"Damme, but you will," returned Miller, the first mate, who, though German, spoke English in real English fashion—a result, he later told me, of fifteen years' service on English boats....

"Take hold of him, Stanger," this to the second mate, a lithe, sun-browned, handsome lad who knew English but hated to speak it.

They wrestled about the cabin at a great rate ... finally they succeeded in forcing a pen into the mutineer's hand....

Then the man calmed down, apparently whipped.

"Very well, where shall I sign?"

"Da," pointed the captain triumphantly, pointing the line out, with his great, hairy forefinger ... and, with victory near, relapsing into German.

But, just as it reached the designated spot, the fellow gave a violent swish with the pen. The mates made a grab for his hand, but too late. He tore a great, ink-smeared rent through the paper....

Whang! Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his big, open right hand on the left side of his face.... Whish! Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his open left, on the other cheek!

The shanghaied man stiffened. He trembled violently.

"Do it a thousand times, my dear captain. I won't sign till you kill me."

"Take him forward. He'll work, and work hard, without signing on.... No, wait ... tie him up to the rail on the poop ... twenty-four hours of that, my man, since you must speak English—will make you change your mind."

He was tied, with his hands behind him.

The captain paced up and down beside him.

Then Franz (as I afterward learned his name) boldly began chaffing the "old man" ... first in English.

"I don't understand," replied Schantze; he was playful now, as a cat is with a mouse ... or rather, like a big boy with a smaller boy whom he can bully.

After all, Schantze was only a big, good-natured "kid" of thirty.

Then Franz ran through one language after another ... Spanish, Italian, French....

The captain noticed me out of the tail of his eye. His big, broad face kindled into a grin.

"What are you doing here on deck, you rascal!" He gave me an affectionate, rough pull of the ear.

"Polishing the brass, sir!"

"And taking everything in at the same time, eh? so you can write a poem about it?"

His vanity flattered, Schantze began answering Franz back, and, to and fro they shuttled their tongues, each showing off to the other—and to me, a mere cabin boy. And Franz, for the moment, seemed to have forgotten how he had been dragged aboard ... and the captain—that Franz was a mutineer, tied to the taffrail for insubordination!

* * * * *

Sea-sickness never came near me. Only it was queer to feel the footing beneath my feet rhythmically rising and falling ... for that's the way it seemed to my land-legs. But then I never was very sturdy on my legs ... which were then like brittle pipestems.... I sprawled about, spreading and sliding, as I went to and from the galley, bringing, in the huge basket, the breakfast, dinner and supper for the cabin....

The sailors called me "Albatross" (from the way an albatross acts when sprawling on shipdeck). They laughed and poked fun at me.

* * * * *

"Look here, you Yankee rascal," said the captain, when I told him I never drank ... "I think it would do you good if you got a little smear of beer-froth on your mouth once in a while ... you'd stop looking leathery like a mummy ... you've already got some wrinkles on your face ... a few good drinks would plump you out, make a man of you.

"In Germany mothers give their babies a sip from their steins before they are weaned ... that's what makes us such a great nation."

* * * * *

If I didn't drink, at least the two mates and the sailmaker made up for me ... we had on board many cases of beer stowed away down in the afterhold, where the sails were stored. And next to the dining room there was the space where provisions were kept—together with kegs of kuemmel, and French and Rhine wines and claret....

And before we had been to sea three days I detected a conspiracy on the part of the first and second mates, the cook, and the sailmaker—the object of the conspiracy being, apparently, to drink half the liquor out of each receptacle, then fill the depleted cask with hot water, shaking it up thoroughly, and so mixing it.

As far as I could judge, the old, bow-legged sailmaker had taken out a monopoly on the cases of beer aft. Never were sails kept in better condition. He was always down there, singing and sewing.

Several times I saw him coming up whistling softly with a lush air of subdued and happy reminiscence.

* * * * *

Several mornings out ... and I couldn't believe my ears ... I heard a sound of music. It sounded like a grind-organ on a city street....

The Sunshine of Paradise Alley.

And the captain's voice was booming along with the melody.

I peeked into Schantze's cabin to announce breakfast.

He had a huge music box there. And he was singing to its playing, and dancing clumsily about like a happy young mammoth.

"Spying on the 'old man,' eh?"

He came over and caught me by an ear roughly but playfully.

"No, Captain, I was only saying breakfast is ready."

"You're a sly one ... do you like that tune? The Sunshine of Paradise Alley? It's my favorite Yankee hymn."

And it must have been; every morning for eighty-nine days the gaudy music box faithfully played the tune over and over again.

* * * * *

The ship drifted slowly through the Sargasso Sea—that dead, sweltering area of smooth waters and endless leagues of drifting seaweed.... Or we lifted and sank on great, smooth swells ... the last disturbance of a storm far off where there were honest winds that blew.

* * * * *

The prickly heat assailed us ... hundreds of little red, biting pimples on our bodies ... the cook's fresh-baked bread grew fuzz in twenty-four hours after baking ... the forecastle and cabin jangled and snarled irritably, like tortured animals....

* * * * *

It was with a shout, one day, that we welcomed a good wind, and shot clear of this dead sea of vegetable matter.

* * * * *

As we crossed the equator Father Neptune came on board ... a curious sea-ceremony that must hark back to the Greeks and Romans....

The bow-legged sailmaker played Neptune.

He combed out a beard of rope, wrapped a sheet around his shoulders, procured a trident of wood....

"Come," shouted one of the sailors to me, running up like a happy boy, "come, see Neptune climbing on board."

The sail-maker pretended to mount up out of the sea, climbing over the forecastle head—just as if he had left his car of enormous, pearl-tinted sea-shell, with the spouting dolphins still hitched to it, waiting for him, while he paid his respects to our captain.

Captain Schantze, First Mate Miller, Second Mate Stange, stood waiting the ceremonial on the officers' bridge, an amused smile playing over their faces.

A big, boy-faced sailor named Klaus, and the ship's blacksmith, a grey-eyed, sandy-haired fellow named Klumpf, followed the sailmaker close behind, as he swept along in his regalia, solemnly and majestically. And Klaus beat a triangle. And Klumpf played an accordion.

"Sailmaker" (the only name he was called by on the ship) made a grandiose speech to the Captain.

Schantze replied in the same vein, beginning,

"Euer Majestaet—"

* * * * *

The sailors marched forward again, to their music, like pleased children. For custom was that they should have plum duff this day, and plenty of hot grog....

Before I was aware, I was caught up by several arms.

For I had never before crossed the line. So I must be initiated.

They set me on a board, over a great barrel of sea-water.

Klumpf gave me a mock-shave with a vile mixture of tar and soap. He used a great wooden razor about three feet long. The officers shouted and laughed, looking on from the bridge.

"What's your name, my boy?" asked Father Neptune.

"John Greg—" Before I could articulate fully the blacksmith thrust a gob of the vile lather into my mouth. As I spluttered and spit everyone gave shouts of laughter. One or two sailors rolled on the deck, laughing, as savages are said to do when overtaken with humour.

The board on which I sat was jerked from under me. Once, two times, three times, I was pushed, almost bent double, far down into the barrel of sea-water. It was warm, at least.

Then a hue and cry went up for Franz. He was caught. He swore that he had crossed the line before, as doubtless he had. But there was now a sort of quiet feud between him and the rest aboard. So in a tumbling heap, they at last bore him over. He fought and shrieked. And because he did not submit and take the ceremony good-naturedly, he was treated rather roughly.

* * * * *

My certificate of initiation was handed me formally and solemnly. It was a semi-legal florid document, sealed with a bit of rope and tar. It certified that I had crossed the line. The witnesses were "The Mainmast," "The Mizzen Mast," and other inanimate ship's parts and objects....

"Keep this," said Sailmaker, as he handed it to me, "as evidence that you have already crossed the line, and you will never be shaved with tar and a wooden razor again. You are now a full-fledged son of Neptune."

* * * * *

On a ship at sea where the work to do never ends, it is a serious matter if one of the crew does not know his work, or fails to hold up his end. That means that there is so much more work to be done by the others.

Franz deliberately shirked. And, as far as I could see, he purposely got in bad with the mates, under whom he had approximately sixty days more of pulling and hauling, going up aloft, scrubbing, and chipping to do. I was puzzled at the steadfast, deliberate malingering of the man. The crew all hated him, too. I have seen the man at the wheel deliberately deflect the ship from its course, in order to bring the wind against the mutineer's belly, hoping to have him blown overboard while he was running aloft....

And one night, in the forecastle, someone hurled a shoe at him. A blow so savagely well-aimed, that when he came running aft, howling with pain (for, for all his obstinacy, he seemed to lack courage)—to complain of the outrage, to Schantze—his eye popped out so far that it seemed as if leaping out of its socket! It was ghastly and bloody like a butchered heart.

Later, I asked the sailors why this had been done to Franz. And Klumpf said—

"We had a scuffle over something. We were all taking it friendly ... and Franz bit Klaus through the hand, almost ... then someone threw a shoe and hit him in the eye"....

* * * * *

In about a week, after his eye had healed just a little, I drew Franz apart. We sat down together on the main hatch. I was worried about him. I did not understand him. I was sorry for him.

"Look here, Franz ... don't you know you might get put clean out of business if you keep this mutiny of one up much longer? You can't whip a whole ship's crew."

"I don't want to whip a whole ship's crew."

"The captain had to have another man in a hurry, you know ... but he's really willing to give you decent treatment."

"Did the captain send you to tell me this?"

"Of course not ... only I'm sorry for you."

Franz gave me a broad, inexplicable wink. He smiled grotesquely—from swollen lips made more grotesque because of a recent punch in the mouth "Sailmaker" had fetched him....

"Don't trouble yourself about me. I know what I'm doing, my boy."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that, as soon as I came out of my drunk, and found myself shanghaied, I wanted them to ill-treat me ... there's a Sailors' Aid Society at Sydney, you know!"

"What good will the Sailors' Aid Society do you?"

"You just wait and see what good it will do me!"

"Nonsense, Franz! The captain's willing to pay you off at Sydney."

"Pay me off, eh? Yes, and the old boy will pay me handsome damages, too!... the sentimental old ladies that have nothing else to do but befriend the poor abused sailor, will see to it that I find justice in the courts there."

"You have a good case against the captain as it is, then. Why don't you turn to and behave and be treated decently?"

"No," he replied, with a curious note of strength in his voice, "the worse I'm treated the more damages I can collect. I'm going to make it a real case of brutal treatment before I leave this old tub."

"But they—they'll—they might kill you!"

"Not much ... those days are about gone ... for a man who knows how to handle himself, as I do....

"Well, let us thank God," he finished, "for the Sailors' Aid Society and the dear old maids at Sydney!"

I walked off, thinking. Franz had sworn me not to tell. Yet I was tempted to. It would get me in right with Captain Schantze.

* * * * *

We shaped to the Cape of Good Hope with great, southern jumps. We were striking far south for the strong, steady winds.

* * * * *

"There was a damned English ship, the Lord Summerville, that left New York about the same time we did ... she's a sky-sailer ... we mustn't let her beat us into Sydney."

"Why not, Captain?"

"An Englishman beat a German!" the captain spat, "fui! We're going to beat England yet at everything ... already we're taking their world-trade away from them ... and some day we'll beat them at sea and on land, both."

"In a war, sir?"

"Yes, in a war ... in a great, big war! It will have to come to that, Johann, my boy."

* * * * *

The cook's opinion on the same subject was illuminating.

He told me many anecdotes which tended to prove that even England's colonies were growing tired of her arrogance: he related droll stories told him by Colonials about the Queen ... obscene and nasty they were, too.

"Catch a German talking that way about the Kaiserin!"

The old cook couldn't realize a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon temperament—that those they rail against and jibe at they love the most!

* * * * *

Off the Tristan da Cunha Islands we ran head-on into a terrific storm ... one that lasted forty-eight hours or more, with rushing, screaming winds, and steady, stinging blasts of sleet that came thick in successions of driving, grey cloud.

It was then that we lost overboard a fine, handsome young Saxon, one Gottlieb Kampke:

Five men aloft ... only four came down ... Kampke was blown overboard off the footrope that ran under the yard, as he stood there hauling in on the sail. For he was like a young bull in strength; and, scorning, in his strength, the tearing wind, he used to heave in with both hands ... not holding fast at all, no matter how hard the wind tore.

* * * * *

It was all that the ship herself could do, to live. Already two lifeboats had been bashed in. And the compass stanchioned on the bridge had gone along with a wave, stanchions and all.

* * * * *

There was no use trying to rescue Gottlieb Kampke. Besides, he would be dead as soon as he reached the water, in such a boiling sea, the captain said to me.

The melancholy cry, "Man overboard!" ...

I took oath that if I ever reached home alive, I would never go to sea again. If I just got home, alive, I would be willing even to tie up brown parcels in grocery cord, for the rest of my life, to sweep out a store day after day, regularly and monotonously, in safety!...

The captain saw me trembling with a nausea of fear. And, with the winds booming from all sides, the deck as slippery as the body of a live eel, he gave me a shove far out on the slant of the poop. I sped in the grey drive of sleet clear to the rail. The ship dipped under as a huge wave smashed over, all fury and foam, overwhelming the helmsman and bearing down on me....

It was miraculous that I was not swept overboard.

After that, strangely, I no longer feared, but enjoyed a quickening of pulse. And I gladly took in the turns in the rope as the men sang and heaved away ... waves would heap up over us. We would hold tight till we emerged again. Then again we would shout and haul away.

* * * * *

"It's all according to what you grow used to," commented the captain.

* * * * *

By the time I was beginning to look into the face of danger as into a mother's face, the weather wore down. The ocean was still heavy with running seas, but we rode high and dry.

* * * * *

Unlucky Kampke!

His shipmates bore his dunnage aft, for the captain to take in charge. And, just as in melodramas and popular novels, a picture of a fair-haired girl was found at the bottom of his sea-chest, together with one of his mother ... his sweetheart and his mother....

Depositions were taken down from his forecastle mates, as to his going overboard, and duly entered into the log ... and the captain wrote a letter to his mother, to be mailed to her from Sydney.

* * * * *

For a day we were sad. An imminent sense of mortality hung over us.

But there broke, the next morning, a clear sky of sunshine and an open though still yesty sea—and we sang, and became thoughtless and gay again.

* * * * *

"Yes," sighed the cook, "I wish it had been Franz instead of Gottlieb. Gottlieb was such a fine fellow, and Franz is such a son of a——."

* * * * *

... I have left something out.

At the beginning of the voyage Captain Schantze housed a flock of two dozen chickens in a coop under the forecastle ... in order to insure himself of fresh eggs during the voyage....

And for fresh meat, he had a huge sow hauled aboard—to be killed later on....

* * * * *

One morning, when I went forward to fetch the captain's and mates' breakfast, I found the cook all white and ghastly....

"What's the matter, Cook?"

"To-day's the day I've got to butcher the sow," he complained, "and I'd give anything to have someone else do it ... I've made such a pet of her during the voyage ... and she's so intelligent and affectionate ... she's decenter than lots of human beings I've met."

I kept to the cabin while the butchering was going on.

The cook, the next day, with tears streaming down his face, told me how trusting the sow had been to the last moment....

"I'll never forget the look in her eyes when she realised what I had done to her when I cut her throat."

"And I'll never be able to eat any of her. I'd throw it up as fast as it went down ... much as I do like good, fresh pork."

* * * * *

The ship-boys, Karl and Albert, always stole the eggs, the captain was sure, as soon as they were laid, though he was never able to catch them at it.

"Run," he would shout hurriedly to me, "there! I hear the hens cackling. They've laid an egg."

I'd run. But there'd be no egg. Someone would have reached the nest, from the forecastle, before I did.

Because the eggs were always stolen as soon as laid, the captain decreed the slaughter of the hens, too ... not a rooster among them ... the hens were frankly unhappy, because of this....

* * * * *

The last hen was to be slain. Pursued, she flew far out over the still ocean. Further and further she flew, keeping up her heavy body as if by an effort of will.

"Come back! Don't be such a damn fool!" I shouted in my excitement.

Everybody was watching when the chicken would light ... how long it could keep up....

As soon as I shouted "come back!" the bird, as if giving heed to my exhortation, slowly veered, and turned toward the ship again. Everybody had laughed till they nearly sank on deck, at my naive words.

Now a spontaneous cheer went up, as the hen slowly tacked and started back....

It was still weather, but the ship was moving ahead....

"She won't make it!"

"She will!"

Another great shout. She lit astern, right by the wheel. Straightway she began running forward, wings spread in genuine triumph.

"Catch her!" shouted the mate.

Nobody obeyed him; they stood by laughing and cheering, till the hen made safety beneath the forecastle head.

* * * * *

She was spared for three days.

* * * * *

"If you ever tell the captain on us," First Mate Miller threatened, as he and the second mate stood over a barrel of Kuemmel, mixing hot water with it, to fill up for what they had stolen, "if you ever tell, I'll see that you go overboard—by accident ... when we clear for Iqueque, after we unload at Sydney."

"Why should I tell? It's none of my business!"

I had come upon them, as they were at work. The cook had sent me into the store-room for some potatoes.

* * * * *

Miller, the first mate, was quite fat and bleary-eyed. He used to go about sweating clear through his clothes on warm days. At such times I could detect the faint reek of alcohol coming through his pores. It's a wonder Schantze didn't notice it, as I did.

* * * * *

Sometimes, at meals, the captain would swear and say, sniffing at the edge of his glass, "What's the matter with this damned brandy ... it tastes more like water than a good drink of liquor."

As he set his glass down in disgust, the mates would solemnly and hypocritically go through the same operation, and express their wonder with the captain's.

Finally one of the latter would remark sagely, "they always try to palm off bad stuff on ships."

In spite of my fear of the mates, I once had to stuff a dirty dish-rag down my mouth to keep from laughing outright. The greasy rag made me gag and almost vomit.

"And what's the matter with you?" inquired Schantze, glaring into the pantry at me, while the two mates also glowered, for a different reason.

* * * * *

"You skinny Yankee," said the captain, taking me by the ear, rather painfully, several days after that incident, "I'm sure someone's drinking my booze. Could it be you, in spite of all your talk about not drinking? You Anglo-Saxons are such dirty hypocrites."

"Indeed, no, sir,—it isn't me."

"Well, this cabin's in your care, and so is the storeroom. You keep a watch-out and find out for me who it is.... I don't think its Miller or the second mate ... it must be either the cook or that old rogue of a sailmaker....

"Or it might be some of the crew," he further speculated, "but anyhow, it's your job to take care of the cabin, as I said before....

"Remember this—all sailors are thieves, aboard ship, if the chance to take anything good to eat or drink comes their way."

I promised to keep a good look-out.

On the other hand....

"Mind you keep your mouth shut ... and don't find things so damned funny, neither," this from the first mate, early one morning, as I scrubbed the floors. He stirred my posteriors heavily with a booted foot, in emphasis.

* * * * *

The sea kicked backward in long, speedy trails of foam, lacing the surface of a grey-green waste of waves....

* * * * *

When I had any spare time, I used to lie in the net under the bowsprit, and read. From there I could look back on the entire ship as it sailed ahead, every sail spread, a magnificent sight.

One day, as I lay there, reading Shelley, or was it my Vergil that I was puzzling out line by line, with occasional glances at the great ship seeming to sail into me—myself poised outward in space—

There came a great surge of water. I leaped up in the net, bouncing like a circus acrobat. My book fell out of my hand into the sea.

I looked up, and saw fully half the crew grinning down at me. The mate stood over me. A bucket that still dripped water in his hand showed me where the water had come from.

"Come up out of there! The captain's been bawling for you for half an hour ... we thought you'd gone overboard."

I came along the net, drenched and forlorn.

"What in hell were you doing down there?"

"I—I was thinking," I stammered.

"He was thinking," echoed the mate scornfully. "Well, thinking will never make a sailor of you."

Boisterous laughter.

"After this do your thinking where we can find you when you're wanted."

As I walked aft, the mate went with me pace for pace, poking more fun at me. To which I dared not answer, as I was impelled, because he was strong and I was very frail ... and always, when on the verge of danger, or a physical encounter, the memory of my Uncle Lan's beatings would now crash into my memory like an earthquake, and render my resolution and sinews all a-tremble and unstrung.

I was of a mind to tell the captain who was drinking his liquor—but here again I feared, and cursed myself for fearing.

When the mate told him of where he had found me, at last—what he had done—what I had said—Schantze laughed....

But, later on, he sympathised with me and unexpectedly remarked:

"Johann, how can you expect a heavy-minded numbskull like Miller to understand!"

Then, laughing, he seized me by the ear—his usual gesture of fondness for me—

"Remember me if you ever write a book about this voyage, and don't give me too black a name! I'm not so bad, am I, eh?"

* * * * *

The Australian coast had lain blue across the horizon for several days.

"Watch me to-morrow!" whispered Franz cryptically to me as he strolled lazily by....

Next day, around noon, I heard a big rumpus on the main deck, I hurried up from the cabin.

There lay Franz, sprawled on his back like a huge, lazy dog, and the mate was shaking his belly with his foot on top of it, just as one plays with a dog ... but to show he was not playing, he delivered the prostrate form of the sailor a swift succession of kicks in the ribs....

"You won't work any longer, you say?"

"No."

"I'll kick your guts out."

"Very well."

"Stand on your feet like a man."

"What for? You'll only knock me down again!" and Franz grinned comically and grotesquely upward, through the gap in his mouth where two of his teeth had been punched out earlier in the voyage.

It was easy to see that Franz's curious attitude of non-resistance had the mate puzzled what to do next. All the sailors indulged in furtive laughter. None of them had a very deep-rooted love for Miller, and, for the first time, they rather sympathised with the man who had been shanghaied ... some of them even snickered audibly ... and straightway grew intent on their work....

Miller turned irritably on them. "And what's the matter with you!"...

"Bring him up here!" shouted Captain Schantze.

Four sailors picked Franz up and carried him, unresisting, bumping his back on the steps as he sagged like a sack half full of flour....

"Here! I've had about enough of this!" cried the captain, furious, "tie him to the rail again!..."

"Now, we'll leave you there, on bread and water, till you say you'll work."

"What does it matter what you do," sauced Franz; "we'll be in port in four days ... and then you'll see what I'll do!"

* * * * *

"What's that?" cried the captain. Then catching an inkling of Franz's scheme, he hit the man a quick, hard blow in the mouth with his clenched fist.

"Give him another!" urged the mate.

But the captain's rage was over, though Franz sent him a bold, mocking laugh, even as the blood trickled down in a tiny red stream from where his mouth had, been struck.

I never saw such courage of its kind.

They left him there for ten hours. But he stood without a sign of exhaustion or giving in. And they untied him. And let him loose.

And, till we hove to at Dalghety's Wharf, in Sydney Harbour, unnoticed, Franz, the Alsace-Lorrainer, roamed the boat at will, like a passenger.

"Wait till I get on shore ... this little shanghaiing party of the captain's will cost him a lot of hard money," he said, in a low voice, to me,—standing idly by, his hands in his pockets, while I was bending over the brass on the bridge railing, polishing away.

"But they've nearly killed you, Franz ... will it be worth it?"

"All I can say is I wish they'd use me rougher."

"You know, Franz, I'm not a bit sorry for you now ... I was at first."

"That so?... I don't need anybody to be sorry for me. In a week or so, when I have won my suit against the captain through the Sailors' Aid Society, I'll be rolling in money ... then you can be sorry for the captain."

* * * * *

Sydney Harbour ... the air alive with sunlight and white flutterings of sea gulls a-wing ... alive with pleasure boats that leaned here and yon on white sails.

* * * * *

Now that we were safe in harbour, I hesitated whether to run away or continue with the ship. For I had signed on to complete the voyage, via Iqueque, on the West Coast of South America, to Hamburg ... I hesitated, I say, because, on shipboard, you're at least sure of food and a place to sleep....

Karl and I had been set to work at giving the cabin a thorough overhauling. We fooled away much of our time looking into the captain's collections of erotic pictures and photographs ... and his obscene books in every language.

And we discovered under the sofa-seat that was built against the side, a great quantity of French syrups and soda waters. So we spent quite a little of our time in mixing temperance drinks for ourselves.

Cautiously I spoke to the cook about what Karl and I were doing. For he knew, of course, that I knew of his marauding ... and of the mates' and sailmaker's ... so it was safe to tell him.

"You'd better be careful," the cook admonished me.

"But what could Captain Schantze want with so many bottles of syrup and soda water aboard?"

"The English custom's officer who comes aboard here is an old friend of Schantze's, and a teetotaler ... so the captain always treats him to soda water."

"But Karl and I have drunk it all up already," I confessed slowly.

"You'll both catch a good hiding then when he calls for it and finds there is none."

The next day the customs man came aboard.

"Have a drink, Mr. Wollaston?" Schantze asked him.

"Yes, but nothing strong," for probably the tenth occasion came the answer.

Then offhandedly, the captain—as if he had not, perhaps, said the same thing for ten previous voyages: "I have some fine French soda water and syrup in my private locker, perhaps you'd like some of that, Mr. Wollaston?"

Mr. Wollaston, whose face and nose was so ruddy and pimply anyone would take him for a toper, answers: "Yes, a little of that Won't do any harm, Captain!"

"Karl!—Johann!" We had been listening, frightened, to the colloquy. We came out, trembling.

"Look under the cushions in my cabin ... bring out some of the syrup and soda water you find there."

"Very well, sir!"

We both hurried in ... stood facing each other, too scared to laugh at the situation. The captain had a heavy hand—and carried a heavy cane when he went ashore. He had the cane with him now.

After a long time: "You tell him there is none," whispered Karl.

"Well, what's wrong in there?" cried Schantze impatiently.

"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I repeated, louder.

"What? Come out here! Speak louder! What did you say?"

"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I murmured, almost inaudibly.

Then Karl, stammering, reinforced me with, "There are a lot of empty bottles here, sir!"

"What does this mean? Every voyage for years I have had soda and French syrup in my locker for Mr. Wollaston."

"Oh, don't mind me," deprecated the little customs man, at the same time as furious as his host.

Karl had already began to blubber in anticipation of the whipping due. The captain laid his heavy cane on everywhere. The boy fell at his feet, bawling louder, less from fear than from the knowledge that his abjectness would please the captain's vanity and induce him to let up sooner.

"Now you come here!" Schantze beckoned me.

He raised the cane at me. But, to my own surprise, something brave and strange entered into me. I would not be humiliated before a countryman of my mother's, that was what it was!

I looked the captain straight in the eye.

"Sir, I did not do it, and I won't be whipped!"

"Wha-at!" ejaculated Schantze, astonished at my novel behaviour.

"I didn't touch the syrup." Karl looked at me, astonished and incredulous at my audacity, through his tear-stained face.

The captain stepped back from me.

I must be telling the truth to be behaving so differently.

"Get to your bunk then!" he commanded.

I obeyed.

"Who is he?" ... I heard the little customs man ask the skipper; "he doesn't talk like an Englishman."

"He isn't. He just a damn-fool Yankee boy I picked up in New York."

* * * * *

They had rounded Franz up and locked him away. The captain was determined to frustrate his little scheme for reimbursement, which he had by this time guessed.

I lie. I must tell the truth in these memoirs.

I had told on him.

But my motive was only an itch to see what would then take place. But when I saw that the issue would be an obvious one: that he would merely be spirited forth to sea again, and this time, forced to work, I felt a little sorry for the man. At the same time, I admit I wanted to observe the denouement myself, of his case ... and as I now intended to desert the ship, it would have to take place in Sydney.

So, on the second night of Franz's incarceration, when nearly everybody was away on shore-leave, I took the captain's bunch of keys, and I let the shanghaied man, the mutineer, the man from Alsace-Lorraine—out!

It was not a very dark night. Franz stole along like a rat till he reached the centre of the dock. There he gave a great shout of defiance ... why, I learned later....

The Lord Summerville, which had, after all, beat us in by two days, despite Captain Schantze's boast, was lying on the other side of our dock. And her mate and several sailors thus became witnesses of what happened.

The shout brought, of course, our few men who remained on watch, on deck, and over on the dock after Franz ... who allowed himself to be caught ... the dock was English ground ... the ship was German ... a good point legally, as the canny Franz had foreseen.

His clothes were almost torn from his body.

Miller accidentally showed up, coming back from shore. And he joined in.

"Come back with us, you verfluchte Alsatz-Lothringer."

The Englishmen from the Lord Summerville now began calling out, "Let him alone!" and "I say, give the lad fair play!"

Some of them leaped down on the dock in a trice.

"Who the hell let him out?" roared the mate.

I stood on deck, holding my breath, and ready to bolt in case Franz betrayed me. But nevertheless my blood was running high and happy over the excitement I had caused by unlocking the door.

"No one let me out. I picked the lock. Will that suit you?" lied Franz, protecting me.

"What's the lad been and done?" asked the mate of the Lord Summerville.

"I was shanghaied in New York," put in Franz swiftly, "and I demand English justice."

"And you shall get it, my man!" answered the mate proudly, "for you have been assaulted on English ground, as I'll stand witness."

A whistle was blown. Men came running. Soon Franz was outside the jurisdiction of Germany.

* * * * *

The next day Captain Schantze stalked about, hardly speaking to Miller. He was angry and laid the blame at the latter's door.

"Miller, why in the name of God didn't you guard that fellow better? An English court ... you know what they'll do to us!"

Miller spread his hands outward, shrugged his shoulders expressively, remained in silence. The two mates and the captain ate the rest of their supper in a silence that bristled.

The ship was detained for ten days more after its cargo had been unloaded.

At the trial, during which the "old maids" and The Sailors' Aid Society came to the fore, Captain Schantze roared his indignant best—so much so that the judge warned him that he was not on his ship but on English ground....

Franz got a handsome verdict in his favour, of course.

And for several days he was seen, rolling drunk about the streets, by our boys, who now looked on him as a pretty clever person.

* * * * *

It was my time to run away—if I ever intended to. Within the next day or so we were to take on coal for the West Coast. We were to load down so heavily, the mate, who had conceived a hatred of me, informed me, that even in fair weather the scuppers would be a-wash. Significantly he added there would be much danger for a man who was not liked aboard a certain ship ... by the mates ... much danger of such a person's being washed overboard. For the waves, you know, washed over the deck of so heavily loaded a ship at will.

* * * * *

On the Lord Summerville was a mad Pennsylvania boy who had, like myself, gone to sea for the first time ... but he had had no uncle to beat timidity into him ... and he had dared ship as able seaman on the big sky-sailed lime-juicer, and had gloriously acquitted himself.

He was a tall, rangy young bullock of a lad. He could split any door with his fist. He liked to drink and fight. And he liked women in the grog-house sense.

One of his chief exploits had been the punching of the second mate in the jaw when both were high a-loft. Then he had caught him about the waist, and held him till he came to, to keep him from falling. The mate had used bad language at him.

Hoppner had worked from the first as if he had been born to the sea.

He and I met in a saloon. The plump little barmaid had made him what she called, "A man's drink," while me she had served contemptuously with a ginger ale.

Hoppner boasted of his exploits. I, of mine.

"I tell you what, Gregory, since we're both jumping ship here, let's be pals for awhile and travel together."

"I'm with you, Hoppner."

"And why jump off empty-handed, since we are jumping off?"

"What is it you're driving at?"

"There ought to be a lot of loot on two boats!"

"Suppose we get caught?" I asked cautiously.

"Anybody that's worth a damn will take a chance in this world. Aren't you game to take a chance?"

"Of course I'm game."

"Well, then, you watch your chance and I'll watch mine. I'll hook into everything valuable that's liftable on my ship and you tend to yours in the same fashion."

* * * * *

We struck hands in partnership, parted, and agreed to meet at the wharf-gate the next night, just after dark, he with his loot, I with mine.

I spent the morning of the following day prospecting. I had seen the captain put the ship's money for the paying of the crew in a drawer, and turn the key.

But first, with a curious primitive instinct, I fixed on a small ham and a loaf of rye bread as part of the projected booty, in spite of the fact that, if I but laid hands on the ship's money, I would have quite a large sum.

It was the piquaresque romance of what I was about to do that moved me. The romance of the deed, not the possession of the objects stolen, that appealed to my imagination. I pictured my comrade and myself going overland, our swag on our backs, eluding pursuit ... and joining with the natives in some far hinterland. I would be a sort of Jonathan Wilde plus a Francois Villon.

Before the captain returned I had surveyed everything to my satisfaction ... after supper the captain and the two mates left for shore again.

Now was the time. I searched the captain's old trousers and found the ship's keys there. They were too bulky to carry around with him.

The keys seemed to jangle like thunder as I tried them one after the other on the drawer where I had seen him put away the gold.

I heard someone coming. I started to whistle noisily, and to polish the captain's carpet slippers! ... it was only someone walking on deck ... The last key was, dramatically, the right one. The drawer opened ... but it was empty! I had seen the captain—the captain had also seen me. Now I started to take anything I could lay my hands on.

I snatched off the wall two silver-mounted cavalry pistols, a present from his brother to Schantze. I added a bottle of kuemmel to the ham and the rye bread. The kuemmel a present for Hoppner.

Then, before leaving the Valkyrie forever, I sat down to think if there were not something I might do to show my contempt for Miller. There were many things I could do, I found.

In the first place, I took a large sail-needle and some heavy-thread and I sewed two pairs of his trousers and two of his coats up the middle of the legs and arms, so he couldn't put them on, at least right away. I picked up hammer and nails and nailed his shoes and sea-boots securely to the middle of his cabin floor. Under his pillow I found a full flask of brandy. I emptied half ... when I replaced it, it was full again. But I had not resorted to the brandy cask to fill it.

* * * * *

The apprehension that I might be come upon flagrante delictu gave me a shiver of apprehension. But it was a pleasurable shiver. I enjoyed the malicious wantonness of my acts, and my prospective jump into the unknown ... all the South Seas waited for me ... all the world!

But, though every moment's delay brought detection and danger nearer, I found time for yet one more stroke. With a laughable vision of Schantze smashing Miller all over the cabin, I wrote and left this note pinned on the former's pillow:

Dear Captain:—

By the time you read this letter I will be beyond your reach (then out of the instant's imagination ... I had not considered such a thing hitherto). I am going far into the interior and discover a gold mine. When I am rich I shall repay you for the cavalry pistols which I am compelled to confiscate in lieu of my wages, which I now forfeit by running away, though entitled to them.

You have been a good captain and I like you.

As for Miller, he is beneath my contempt. It was he who drank all your wines, brandies, and whiskies ... the sailmaker is to answer for your beer. The second mate has been in on this theft of your liquors, too (I left the cook out because he had been nice to me).

Good-bye, and good luck.

Your former cabin boy, and, though you may not believe me, always your well-wisher and friend,

JOHN GREGORY.

I left what I had stolen bundled up in my blanket. I walked forward nonchalantly to see if anyone was out to observe me. I discovered the sandy-haired Blacksmith, Klumpf, sitting on the main hatch. I saw that I could not pass him with my bundle without strategy. The strategy I employed was simple.

I drew him a bottle of brandy. I gave it to him. After he had drawn a long drink I told him I was running away from the ship. He laughed and took another drink. I passed him with my bundle. He shouted good-bye to me.

Before I had gone by the nose of the old ship, who should I run into but Klaus, coming back from a spree. He was pushing along on all fours like an animal, he was so drunk ... good, simple Klaus, whom I liked. I laid down my bundle, risking capture, while I helped him to the deck. He stopped a moment to pat the ship's side affectionately as if it were a living friend, or nearer, a mother.

"Gute alte Valkyrie!.. gute alte Valkyrie!" he murmured.

* * * * *

Safe so far. At the outside of the dock-gate Hoppner waited my arrival. He was interested in the kuemmel, and in the pistols, which were pawnable.

He had been more daring than I. He had tried to pick his captain's pocket of a gold watch while the latter slept. But every time he reached for it the captain stirred uneasily. He would have snatched it anyhow, but just then his first mate stepped into the cabin ... "and I hid till the mate went out again."

"And what then?"

"I picked up a lot of silverware the captain had for show occasions ... that I found, rummaging about."

"And him there sleeping?"

"Why not?"

"I found four revolvers that belonged to the mates and captain. I put them all in one bundle and chucked them into a rowboat over the ship's side. And now we must go back to your boat—"

"To my boat?" I asked, amazed.

"Yes" (I had told him how nearly I had missed our ship-money).

"To your boat, and ransack the cabin till we locate that coin."

"That's too risky."

"Hell, take a chance, can't you?"

That's what Hoppner was always saying as long as we travelled together: "Hell, take a chance."

But when I began telling him with convulsive laughter, of the revenge I had taken on the mate ... and also how I had thrown all the keys overboard, Hoppner, instead of joining in with my laughter, struck at me, not at all playfully, "What kind of damn jackass have I joined up with, anyhow," he exclaimed. "Now it won't be any use going back, you've thrown the keys away and we'd make too great a racket, breaking open things...."

He insisted, however, on going back to his own boat, sliding down to the rowboat, and rowing away with the loot he had cast into it. We had no sooner reached the prow of the Lord Summerville than we observed people bestirring themselves on board her more than was natural.

"Come on, now we'll beat it. They're after me."

Hoppner had also brought a blanket. We went "humping bluey" as swagmen, as the tramp is called in Australia.

The existence of the swagman is the happiest vagrant's life in the world. He is usually regarded as a bona fide seeker for work, and food is readily given him for the asking. Unlike the American hobo, he is given his food raw, and is expected to cook it himself. So he carries what he calls a "tucker bag" to hold his provisions; also, almost more important—his "billy can" or tea-pot....

Hoppner and I acquired the tea-habit as badly as the rest of the Australian swagmen. Every mile or so the swagman seems to stop, build a fire, and brew his draught of tea, which he makes strong enough to take the place of the firiest swig of whiskey. I've seen an old swagman boil his tea for an actual half-hour, till the resultant concoction was as thick and black as New Orleans molasses. With such continual draughts of tea, only the crystalline air, and the healthy dryness of the climate keeps them from drugging themselves to death.

"Tea ain't any good to drink unless you can put a stick straight up in it, and it can stand alone there," joked an old swagman, who had invited us to partake of a hospitable "billy-can" with him.

* * * * *

We had long, marvellous talks with different swagmen, as we slowly sauntered north to Newcastle....

We heard of the snakes of Australia, which workmen dug up in torpid writhing knots, in the cold weather ... of native corrobories which one old informant told us he had often attended, where he procured native women or "gins" as they called them, for a mere drink of whiskey or gin ... "that's why they calls 'em 'gins'" he explained ... (wrong, for "gin" or a word of corresponding sound is the name for "woman" in many native languages in the antipodes)....

The azure beauty of those days!... tramping northward with nothing in the world to do but swap stories and rest whenever we chose, about campfires of resinous, sweetly smelling wood ... drinking and drinking that villainous tea.

In Australia the law against stealing rides on freights is strictly enforced. The tramp has always to walk—to the American tramp this is at first a hardship, but you soon grow to like it ... you learn to enjoy the wine in the air, the fragrance of the strange trees that shed bark instead of leaves, the noise of scores of unseen Waterfalls in the hills of New South Wales.

The morning that the little sea-port of Newcastle lay before us, I felt as if I had been on tour through a strange world. For the first time the story-books of my youth had come true.