n who had come to
Liverpool with crates of fowl, made me miserable by throwing her arms
around me the moment I had alighted from my cab and telling the sailor who
carried my luggage that she had held me in her arms when I was a baby. The
sailor may have known me almost as well, for I was often at Sligo quay to
sail my boat; and I came and went once or twice in every year upon the ss.
_Sligo_ or the ss. _Liverpool_ which belonged to a company that had for
directors my grandfather and his partner William Middleton. I was always
pleased if it was the _Liverpool_, for she had been built to run the
blockade during the war of North and South.

I waited for this voyage always with excitement and boasted to other boys
about it, and when I was a little boy had walked with my feet apart as I
had seen sailors walk. I used to be sea-sick, but I must have hidden this
from the other boys and partly even from myself; for, as I look back, I
remember very little about it, while I remember stories I was told by the
captain or by his first mate, and the look of the great cliffs of Donegal
& Tory Island men coming alongside with lobsters, talking Irish and, if it
was night, blowing on a burning sod to draw our attention. The captain, an
old man with square shoulders and a fringe of grey hair round his face,
would tell his first mate, a very admiring man, of fights he had had on
shore at Liverpool; and perhaps it was of him I was thinking when I was
very small and asked my grandmother if God was as strong as sailors. Once,
at any rate, he had been nearly wrecked; the _Liverpool_ had been all but
blown upon the Mull of Galloway with her shaft broken, and the captain had
said to his mate, "mind and jump when she strikes, for we don't want to be
killed by the falling spars;" and when the mate answered, "my God, I
cannot swim," he had said, "who could keep afloat for five minutes in a
sea like that?" He would often say his mate was the most timid of men and
that "a girl along the quays could laugh him out of anything." My
grandfather had more than once given the mate a ship of his own, but he
had always thrown up his berth to sail with his old captain where he felt
safe. Once he had been put in charge of a ship in a dry dock in Liverpool,
but a boy was drowned in Sligo, and before the news could reach him he
wired to his wife, "ghost, come at once, or I will throw up berth." He had
been wrecked a number of times and maybe that had broken his nerv