He was good enough to say then, "Of course I see that you are a
gentleman. But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able
Seaman if possible. Is that it?"

It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he
could not help me much in this. There was an Act of Parliament which
made it penal to procure ships for sailors. "An Act-of-Parliament. A
law," he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign
understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.

I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an
Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However, the _barocco_
apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round
the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. Yet, strictly
speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen; and in retrospect
there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin of mine. For this Act
of Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the Victorian era, had been
in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me. For many years it had
regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of
my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as
possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling. It isn't such
a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four
corners of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to say that its
seventies have never been applied to me.

In the year 1878, the year of "Peace with Honour," I had walked as lone
as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street
Station, to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the year of the
war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was
there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties
grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendships
secured. It was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle.

All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at his
lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life
of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful,
entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations
crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.

I felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered upon, was bound to
take me away from daily life's actualities at every step. I felt it more