g upside down,
a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there
spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....

"That's a reflection of some real city," explained the tall
Canadian-Scotch cook ... "once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky
...--thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving."

Half-way across to the Soo Canal we ran into my first lake-storm.

"The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor.
He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land
on every side."

Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the
propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears,
and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic
clang of coal as it shot from shovels....

The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling
impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.

I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to
keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of
coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars ... greeting with
oaths and comic curses the awkward coal passer who spilled with his
laden wheelbarrow into the slightly lower pit where they stood.

I quit the _James Eads Howe_ at Ashtabula, after several round trips in
her, the length of the Lakes.

I freighted it to Chicago, where I shipped, again as porter, on a
package freighter.

* * * * *

The captain of the package freighter _Overland_ should have been
anything but a captain. He was a tall, flabby, dough-faced man, as timid
as a child just out of the nursery.

We had taken on, as one of our firemen, a Canuck, who, from the first,
boasted that he was a "bad man"....

He intimidated the cook right off. He punched in a glass partition to
emphasise a filthy remark he had made to the head engineer. He went
after me, to bully and domineer me, next.

It looked as if we were in for a hard voyage to the Georgian Bay.

The Canuck, at the very first meal, terrorised the crew that sat down
with him. I looked him over carefully, and realised that something must
be done.

He flung a filthy and gratuitous expression my way. Silently I stepped
back from the mess room, untied my apron, and meant to go in and try to
face him down. But at that juncture, my courage failed me, and instead
of inviting the rough-neck out