The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Ocean Tramp, by William McFee

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Title: An Ocean Tramp

Author: William McFee

Release Date: December 11, 2009 [EBook #30648]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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An Ocean Tramp

By
William McFee

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1924

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

_Books by William McFee_

ALIENS
AN OCEAN TRAMP
CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER
CASUALS OF THE SEA
PORT SAID MISCELLANY

TO
A---- R----

_"She was lovable, and he loved her. But he
was not lovable, and she did not love him."_

--HEINE'S _Reisebilder_

PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION

In the original preface to the First Edition, it will be seen that by
a perfectly justifiable stroke of artistic manipulation, the writer of
the letters, the Ocean Tramp himself, is drowned at sea. Neither
author nor publisher had offered any guarantee that the book was a
record of cold facts, and it was not deemed necessary at that time to
disillusion any of the public who saw fit to send in condolences upon
the tragic end of a promising career. Nevertheless, the book was
faithful enough in a larger sense, for the young man who wrote it had
undoubtedly died and buried himself in its pages. His place, it
appeared presently, was taken by a cynical person who voyaged all over
the seven seas in various steamers, accumulating immense stocks of
local colour, passing through the divers experiences which befall
sailor-men, reading a good many books, and gradually assuming the
_role_ of an amused spectator. Of this person, however, there is no
need to speak just now, and we must go back to the time when the
author, in that condition known to the cloth as "out of a ship,"
arrived in London, the following pages tied up in a piece of bunting,
in his dunnage, and took a small su