I awoke only for English Composition.  But there, inevitably, I quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was to be written.  She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model.  I pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced, modern one—­as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose.  We had altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman’s eyes raged behind her glasses at me—­to the laughter of the rest of the class.  Who really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great books as I did.

Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do in the Ode to the Nightingale and in the Epipsychidion....

Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed.  Josiah Flynt’s Tramping With Tramps,—­and one other—­Two Years Before the Mast, by Dana.  And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity’s liberation, with visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests, little towns on river-bends.

A tramp or sailor—­which?

First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and back again?

Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett and Fielding?

It took me days of talk with the gang—­boasting—­and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch.

Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New York waterfront that same afternoon....

I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to go to sea, and that he needn’t try to find me in order to fetch me home again.  I wished him good luck and good-bye.

Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books:  my Caesar and Vergil in the Latin, Young’s Night Thoughts, and Shelley.

* * * * *

South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts dizzy things to look up at.

I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side.  First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft.  And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft.  I could smell the good aroma of that coffee.  Ever since, the smell of coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.

“Hey, Jimmy,” I shouted to the boy.

“Hey, yourself!” he replied, coming belligerently to the side.  Then, “what do ye want?”

“To go to sea.  Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?”

He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.