Bedient had been with him as cook for over a year, during which the Truxton had swung down to Australia and New South Wales, and called at half the Asiatic and insular ports from Vladivostok to Bombay.  Since he was a little chap (back of which were the New York memories, vague, but strange and persistent), there had always been some ship for Bedient, but the Truxton was by far the happiest....  It was from the Truxton just a few months before that he had gone ashore day after day for a fortnight at Adelaide; and a wee woman five years older, and a cycle wiser, had invariably been waiting with new mysteries in her house....  Moreover, on the Truxton, he had nothing to do with the forecastle galley—­there was a Chinese for that—­and Captain Carreras, fancying him from the beginning, had quartered him aft, where, except on days like this, when Mother Earth’s pneumatic cushion seemed limp and flattened, there was a breeze to hammock in, and plenty of candles for night reading.

Then the Captain had a box of books, the marvel of which cannot begin to be described.  Andrew’s books were but five or six, chosen for great quantity and small bulk; tightly and toughly bound little books of which the Bible was first.  This was his book of fairies, his Aesop; his book of wanderings and story, of character and mystery; his revelations, the source of his ideality, the great expander of limitations; his book of love and adventure and war; the book unjudgable and the bed-rock of all literary judgment.  He knew the Bible as only one can who has played with it as a child; as only one can who has found it alone available, when an insatiable love of print has swept across the young mind.  Nothing could change him now; this was his book of Fate.

Except for those vision-times in the big city, Andrew could not remember when he had not read the Bible, nor did he remember learning to read.  He seemed to have forgotten how to read before he came to sea at seven, but when an old sailor pointed out on the stern of the jolly-boat, the letters that formed the name of his first ship—­it had all come back to the child; and then he found his first Bible.  Slowly conceiving its immensity, its fullness for him—­he was almost lifted from his body with the upward winging of happiness.  It was his first great exaltation, and there was a sacredness about it which kept him from telling anybody....  And now all the structures of the great Scripture were tenoned in his brain; so that he knew the frame of every part, but the inner meanings of more and more marvellous dimension seemed inexhaustible.  Always excepting the great Messianic Figure—­the white tower of his consciousness—­he loved Saint Paul and the Forerunner best among the men....