This master of a ship I remember first as a slim lad, with a shy smile, and large hands that were lonely beyond his outgrown reefer jacket.  His cap was always too small for him, and the soiled frontal badge of his line became a coloured button beyond his forelock.  He used to come home occasionally—­and it was always when we were on the point of forgetting him altogether.  He came with a huge bolster in a cab, as though out of the past and nowhere.  There is a tradition, a book tradition, that the boy apprenticed to the sea acquires saucy eyes, and a self-reliance always ready to dare to that bleak extreme the very thought of which horrifies those who are lawful and cautious.  They know better who live where the ships are.  He used to bring his young shipmates to see us, and they were like himself.  Their eyes were downcast.  They showed no self-reliance.  Their shyness and politeness, when the occasion was quite simple, were absurdly incommensurate even with modesty.  Their sisters, not nearly so polite, used to mock them.

As our own shy lad was never with us for long, his departure being as abrupt and unannounced as his appearance, we could willingly endure him.  But he was extraneous to the household.  He had the impeding nature of a new and superfluous piece of furniture which is in the way, yet never knows it, and placidly stays where it is, in its wooden manner, till it is placed elsewhere.  There was a morning when, as he was leaving the house, during one of his brief visits to his home, I noticed to my astonishment that he had grown taller than myself.  How had that happened?  And where?  I had followed him to the door that morning because, looking down at his cap which he was nervously handling, he had told me he was going then to an examination.  About a week later he announced, in a casual way, that he had got his masters ticket.  After the first shock of surprise, caused by the fact that this information was an unexpected warning of our advance in years, we were amused, and we congratulated him.  Naturally he had got his certificate as master mariner.  Why not?  Nearly all the mates we knew got it, sooner or later.  That was bound to come.  But very soon after that he gave us a genuine surprise, and made us anxious.  He informed us, as casually, that he had been appointed master to a ship; a very different matter from merely possessing the licence to command.

We were even alarmed.  This was serious.  He could not do it.  He was not the man to make a command for anything.  A fellow who, not so long ago, used to walk a mile with a telegram because he had not the strength of character to face the lady clerk in the post office round the corner, was hardly the man to overawe a crowd of hard characters gathered by chance from Tower Hill, socialize them, and direct them successfully in subduing the conflicting elements of a difficult enterprise.  Not he.  But we said nothing to discourage him.