aged with politeness. Far more than any monetary or more practical
consideration, it was, I am certain, this desire of my father's to get
away from people which had led to our migration.

'People interrupt one so horribly,' was a remark he frequently made to
me.

V

Folk whose experience of sea travel is confined to the passengers'
quarters on board modern steamships of high tonnage can have but a
shadowy conception of what a three months' passage round the Cape
means, when it is made in a 1200 ton sailing vessel. I can pretend to
no technical knowledge of ships and seafaring; but it is always with
something of condescension in my mental attitude that I set foot on
board a steamship, or hear praise of one of the palatial modern
'smoke-stacks.' It was thus I remember that the _Ariadne's_ seamen
spoke of steamships.

I suppose room could almost be found for the _Ariadne_ in the saloons
of some of the twentieth-century Atlantic greyhounds. But I will wager
that the whole fleet of them could not show a tithe of her grace and
spirited beauty in a sea-way. And, be it noted, they would not be so
extravagantly far ahead of the _Ariadne_ even in point of speed, say,
between the Cape and Australia, when, in running her easting down with
a living gale on her quarter, she spurned the foam from her streaming
sides to the tune of a steady fourteen to fifteen knots in an hour;
'snoring along,' as seamen say, with all her cordage taut as
harp-strings, and her clouds of canvas soaring heavenward tier on tier,
strained to the extreme limit of the fabric's endurance.

From talk with my father, I knew the _Ariadne_ of mythology, and so
the sight of the patent log-line trailing in the creamy turmoil of our
wake used always to suggest imaginings to me, as I leaned gazing over
our poop rail, of a modern Theseus being rescued by this line of ours
from the labyrinthine caverns of some submarine Minotaur.

Aye, she was a brave ship, and these were brave days of continuously
stirring interest to the lad fresh from Putney and its Academy for the
Sons of Gentlemen; or, as I should probably say, from one of its
academies. I do not recall that life itself, the great spectacle, had
at this period any interest for me, as such. My musings had not
carried me so far. But the things and people about me, the play of the
elements, and the unceasing and ever-varying activities of the ship's
working, appealed to me as his love to a lover, filling my