-four required
by a healthy youngster for sleep. Out of those nine hours, after I was
in bed and ere my eyes drowsed shut, I managed to steal a little time for
reading.

But many a night I did not knock off work until midnight. On occasion I
worked eighteen and twenty hours on a stretch. Once I worked at my
machine for thirty-six consecutive hours. And there were weeks on end
when I never knocked off work earlier than eleven o'clock, got home and
in bed at half after midnight, and was called at half-past five to dress,
eat, walk to work, and be at my machine at seven o'clock whistle blow.

No moments here to be stolen for my beloved books. And what had John
Barleycorn to do with such strenuous, Stoic toil of a lad just turned
fifteen? He had everything to do with it. Let me show you. I asked
myself if this were the meaning of life--to be a work-beast? I knew of no
horse in the city of Oakland that worked the hours I worked. If this
were living, I was entirely unenamoured of it. I remembered my skiff,
lying idle and accumulating barnacles at the boat-wharf; I remembered the
wind that blew every day on the bay, the sunrises and sunsets I never
saw; the bite of the salt air in my nostrils, the bite of the salt water
on my flesh when I plunged overside; I remembered all the beauty and the
wonder and the sense-delights of the world denied me. There was only one
way to escape my deadening toil. I must get out and away on the water.
I must earn my bread on the water. And the way of the water led
inevitably to John Barleycorn. I did not know this. And when I did
learn it, I was courageous enough not to retreat back to my bestial life
at the machine.

I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds of
adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay,
from raided oyster-beds and fights at night on shoal and flat, to markets
in the morning against city wharves, where peddlers and saloon-keepers
came down to buy. Every raid on an oyster-bed was a felony. The penalty
was State imprisonment, the stripes and the lockstep. And what of that?
The men in stripes worked a shorter day than I at my machine. And there
was vastly more romance in being an oyster pirate or a convict than in
being a machine slave. And behind it all, behind all of me with youth
abubble, whispered Romance, Adventure.

So I interviewed my Mammy Jennie, my old nurse at whose black breast I
had suckled. She