d. I could work better on it. There was no food in ginger
ale. After that, when I couldn't sneak out of it, I drank beer and
wondered what men found in it that was so good. I was always aware that
I was missing something.

What I really liked in those days was candy. For five cents I could buy
five "cannon-balls"--big lumps of the most delicious lastingness. I
could chew and worry a single one for an hour. Then there was a Mexican
who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy for five cents each. It
required a quarter of a day properly to absorb one of them. And many a
day I made my entire lunch off one of those slabs. In truth, I found
food there, but not in beer.

CHAPTER VI

But the time was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my second
series of bouts with John Barleycorn. When I was fourteen, my head
filled with the tales of the old voyagers, my vision with tropic isles
and far sea-rims, I was sailing a small centreboard skiff around San
Francisco Bay and on the Oakland Estuary. I wanted to go to sea. I
wanted to get away from monotony and the commonplace. I was in the
flower of my adolescence, a-thrill with romance and adventure, dreaming
of wild life in the wild man-world. Little I guessed how all the warp
and woof of that man-world was entangled with alcohol.

So, one day, as I hoisted sail on my skiff, I met Scotty. He was a husky
youngster of seventeen, a runaway apprentice, he told me, from an English
ship in Australia. He had just worked his way on another ship to San
Francisco; and now he wanted to see about getting a berth on a whaler.
Across the estuary, near where the whalers lay, was lying the sloop-yacht
Idler. The caretaker was a harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on
the whale ship Bonanza. Would I take him, Scotty, over in my skiff to
call upon the harpooner?

Would I! Hadn't I heard the stories and rumours about the Idler?--the big
sloop that had come up from the Sandwich Islands where it had been
engaged in smuggling opium. And the harpooner who was caretaker! How
often had I seen him and envied him his freedom. He never had to leave
the water. He slept aboard the Idler each night, while I had to go home
upon the land to go to bed. The harpooner was only nineteen years old
(and I have never had anything but his own word that he was a harpooner);
but he had been too shining and glorious a personality for me ever to
address as I paddled around the yacht at