that I remember. I row a little when I get the chance. But,
perhaps, if you say so, I may have read something."

He went away shortly afterward to deal with booksellers, and I wondered
how a bank clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a profligate
abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of
extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in
unnamed seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through revolt
against the overseas, to command of a ship of his own, and ultimate
establishment of a kingdom on an island "somewhere in the sea, you
know"; and, delighted with my paltry five pounds, had gone out to buy
the notions of other men, that these might teach him how to write. I
had the consolation of knowing that this notion was mine by right of
purchase, and I thought that I could make something of it.

When next he came to me he was drunk--royally drunk on many poets for
the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words
tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations. Most of
all was he drunk with Longfellow.

"Isn't it splendid? Isn't it superb?" he cried, after hasty greetings.
"Listen to this--

"'Wouldst thou,' so the helmsman answered,
'Know the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.'

By gum!

"'Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.'"

he repeated twenty times, walking up and down the room and forgetting
me. "But I can understand it too," he said to himself. "I don't know how
to thank you for that fiver. And this; listen--

"'I remember the black wharves and the ships
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.'

"I haven't braved any dangers, but I feel as if I knew all about it."

"You certainly seem to have a grip of the sea. Have you ever seen it?"

"When I was a little chap I went to Brighton once; we used to live in
Coventry, though, before we came to London. I never saw it,

'When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the Equinox.'"

He shook me by the shoulder to make me understand the passion that was
shaking himself.

"When that storm comes," he continued, "I think that all the oars in
the ship that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have their
chests smashed in by the bucking oar-heads.