Manuscripts.  He riffled the pages ruefully.  Sonnets and chant-royals and epics, fine and lofty in spirit; so fine indeed that they easily sifted through every editorial office in London.  There was even a bulky romance.  He had read so much about the enormous royalties which American authors received for their work, and English authors who were popular on the other side, that his ambition had been frenetically stirred.  The fortunes such men as Maundering and Piffle and Drool made!  And all he had accomplished so far had been the earnest support of the postal service.  Far back at the beginning he had been unfortunate enough to sell a sonnet for ten shillings.  Alack!  You sell your first sonnet, you win your first hand at cards, and then the passion has you.

Poetry was a drug on the market.  Nobody read it (or wrote it) these days; and any one who attempted to sell it was clearly mad.  Oh, a jingle for Punch might pass, you know; something clever, with a snapper to it.  But epic poetry?  Sonnets?  Why, didn’t you know that there wasn’t a magazine going that did not have some sub-editor who could whack out fourteen lines in fourteen minutes, whenever a page needed filling up?  These things he had been told times without number.  And Maundering, Piffle and Drool had long since cornered the romance market.  The King’s Highway had become No Thoroughfare.

America.  He would go to the land of the brave (when occasion demanded) and the free (if you were imaginative).  Having packed his trunk and valise, he departed for Liverpool.  Besides, America was all that was left; he was at the end of his rope.

What a rollicking old fraud life was!  Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood!  An ass, indeed, if ever there was one.

He eventually arrived at his destination, lied blithely to the chief steward, and was assigned to the first-class cabins on the promenade deck, simply because his manner was engaging and his face pleasing to the eye.  The sea?  He had never been on it but once, and then only in a rowboat.  A good sailor?  Perhaps.  Chicken and barley broths at eleven; the captain’s table in the dining-saloon, breakfast, luncheon and dinner; cabin housekeeper and luggage man at the ports; and always a natty, stiffly starched jacket with a metal number; and “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!” and “Thank you, sir!” his official vocabulary.  Fine job for a poet!

It was all in the game he was going to play with fate.  A chap who could sell flamingo ties to gentlemen with purple moses, and shirts with attached cuffs to coal-porters ought not to worry over such a simple employment as cabin-steward on board an ocean liner.