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