I'd allus watched for a chance to run away, and thar was Jim, the anchor-watch, squatting on the bitts dead asleep. He used to be that way when nobody chased him.

I daresn't make for the coast. You see I'd heard tell of niggers ashore which eat boys who run away. But I seen the lights of the three-masted schooner a couple of miles to windward. I grabbed a sealing gaff and slid down on to the ice.

First, as the pans rocked under me, I was scary, next I warmed up, gettin' venturesome, until I came near sliding into the wet, and after that I'd look before I lep'. There'd been a tops'l breeze from the norrard, blowin' up since nightfall to a hurricane, and then it blew some more, until I couldn't pole-jump for fear of being blowed away. With any other ship, I'd have wished myself back on board.

You know how the grinding piles an edge around each pan, of broken splinters? That edge shone white agin the black of the water, all the guide I had. But times the squalls of wind was like scythes edged with sleet, so I was blinded, waiting, freezing until a lull came, and I'd get on. It was broad day, and I reckon each step weighed a ton before I made that schooner.

A gray man, fat, with a chin whisker, lifted me in overside. "Come far?" says he, and I turned round to show him the Zedekiah. She wasn't there. She was gone—foundered.

So that's how I came aboard of the Happy Ship, just like a lil' lost dog, with no room in my skin for more'n bones and famine. Captain Smith used to say he'd signed me on as family ghost; but he paid me honest wages, fed me honest grub, while as to clothes and bed, I was snug as a little rabbit. He taught me reading and writing, and punctuation with his belt, sums, hand, reef, and steer, catechism, knots and splices, sewing, squeegee, rule of the road, soojie moojie, psalms of David, constitution of the United States, and playing the trombone, with three pills and a good licking regular Saturday nights. Mother's little boy began to set up and take notice.

Then five years in the Pawtucket all along, from Montreal to Colon, from banjos plunking in them portales of Vera Cruz, to bugles crying revally in Quebec, and the oyster boats asleep by old Point Comfort, and the Gloucester fleet a-storming home past Sable, and dagos basking on Havana quays. Suck oranges in the dinghy under the moonlight, waiting to help the old man aboard when he's drunk; watch the niggers humping cotton into a tramp at Norfolk; feel the tide-rip snoring up past Tantramar; reef home trys'ls when she's coming on to blow, with the Keys to lee'ard; can't I just feel the old Pawnticket romping home to be in time for Christmas!

Did you hear tell that the sea has feelings—the cryin', the laugh, dumb sorrow, blazin' wrath, the peace, the weariness, the mother-kindness, the hush like prayers of something which ain't brute, or human, but more'n human, so grand and awful you hardly dare to breathe?

Words, only words which don't fit, the misfits which make fun of serious thoughts. We men is dumb beasts which can't say what we mean, whereas I've allus reckoned persons like cats and wolves don't feel so much emotions as they exudes in song.

Seafaring men is sea-wise, sea-kind, only land-foolish, for there's things no sailorman knows how to say, things even landsmen can't figure out in dollars and cents.