Did I overhear a civil murmur, “That’s very gratifying, to be sure”?  Well, yes, it is gratifying—­thank you.  It is at least as gratifying to be certified sober as to be certified romantic, though such certificates would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution such as the London County Council, for instance.  The above prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs.  I make a point of it because a couple of years ago, a certain short story of mine being published in a French translation, a Parisian critic—­I am almost certain it was M. Gustave Kahn in the “Gil-Blas”—­giving me a short notice, summed up his rapid impression of the writer’s quality in the words un puissant reveur.  So be it!  Who would cavil at the words of a friendly reader?  Yet perhaps not such an unconditional dreamer as all that.  I will make bold to say that neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of responsibility.  There is more than one sort of intoxication.  Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame.  It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.  I have tried to be a sober worker all my life—­all my two lives.  I did so from taste, no doubt, having an instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession, but also from artistic conviction.  Yet there are so many pitfalls on each side of the true path that, having gone some way, and feeling a little battered and weary, as a middle-aged traveller will from the mere daily difficulties of the march, I ask myself whether I have kept always, always faithful to that sobriety wherein there is power, and truth, and peace.

As to my sea-sobriety, that is quite properly certified under the sign-manual of several trustworthy shipmasters of some standing in their time.  I seem to hear your polite murmur that “Surely this might have been taken for granted.”  Well, no.  It might not have been.  That august academical body the Marine Department of the Board of Trade takes nothing for granted in the granting of its learned degrees.  By its regulations issued under the first Merchant Shipping Act, the very word sober must be written, or a whole sackful, a ton, a mountain of the most enthusiastic appreciation will avail you nothing.  The door of the examination rooms shall remain closed to your tears and entreaties.  The most fanatical advocate of temperance could not be more pitilessly fierce in his rectitude than the Marine Department of the Board of Trade.  As I have been face to face at various times with all the examiners of the Port of London, in my generation, there can be no doubt as to the force and the continuity of