r written than I repent them. It
is not a folly for a boy to be honestly in love, as I was in love with
Barbara. I was silly, if you please--a moon-struck, calf-loving idiot,
if you like--but in all that hot noon of my madness there never was an
unclean thought in my mind nor an unclean prompting of the body.
However, all that was past and done with. My liver was washed clean of
that passion; it had not left a spot upon my heart. I have only loved
two women in all my life, and when the second love came into my life
that first fancy was dead and buried, and no other fancy has ever for a
moment arisen to trouble my happiness.

CHAPTER XV

UTOPIA HO!

I have purposely left out of these pages the record of the voyage. One
such voyage is much like another, and though it was all new to me it
would not be new to others. I might like to dwell again upon the first
land we made, the Island of St. Jago, where we had civil entertainment
of a Portuguese gentleman and of a negro Romish priest, with a merry
heart and merry heels. My mother would have loved to go marketing in
that place, for I bought no less than one hundred sweet oranges for half
a paper of pins, and five fat hens for the other half of the paper. I
could talk of our becalms and our storms and our crossing the Line, and
of our trouble with the travado-wind. But as I do not wish to weary with
the repetition of an oft-told tale, I will say no more of our voyage
until we came to the Cape which is so happily named of Good Hope. It was
a very wonderful voyage for me; it would not seem a very wonderful
voyage to others, who have either made it themselves or who know out of
book knowledge all and more than all that I could tell them. But I may
say that I was a very different lad when we came to the Cape from the
lad who had got on board of the Royal Christopher so many months
earlier. I was but a pale-faced boy when I sailed, only a landsman, and
no great figure as a landsman. But when we came to the Cape I was so
coloured by the winds and the suns and the open life that my face and
hands were well-nigh of the tint of burnished copper. I had always been
a fairly strong lad; but now my strength was multiplied many times, and,
thanks to my dear master, my skill to use that strength was marvellously
advanced. Which proved to be of infinite service to me and others better
than myself by-and-by.

We stayed some little time at Cape Town; how long now I do not closely
r