The fiddle, stringless, still;
Old chums, since all of you are dead,
’Neath forest steep and hill,
I cannot play the songs you loved;
But with tired eyes and pen
I strive to tell the truth, who roved,
And found you—God’s best men.
PREFACE
In the following chapters, wherein I have endeavoured to write down my experiences at sea, in Australia and on the South Sea Islands, I have not gone beyond the first four or five years of my life abroad, but later on I hope to do so, if I get the chance. I have made no attempt to moralise in my book, and if I appear to have been guilty of doing so, be assured it was a spasm of the intellect and quite forgotten all about a few minutes after I had written it down.