The Ancient Mariner straightened up his shoulders, threw his head back, then bowed it and repeated, “No, I never squealed.  I went into the poor-house, or the county poor-farm as they call it.  I lived sordidly.  I lived like a beast.  For six months I lived like a beast, and then I saw my way out.  I set about building the Wide Awake.  I built her plank by plank, and copper-fastened her, selected her masts and every timber of her, and personally signed on her full ship’s complement fore-and-aft, and outfitted her amongst the Jews, and sailed with her to the South Seas and the treasure buried a fathom under the sand.

“You see,” he explained, “all this I did in my mind, for all the time I was a hostage in the poor-farm of broken men.”

The Ancient Mariner’s face grew suddenly bleak and fierce, and his right hand flashed out to Daughtry’s wrist, prisoning it in withered fingers of steel.

“It was a long, hard way to get out of the poor-farm and finance my miserable little, pitiful little, adventure of the Wide Awake.  Do you know that I worked in the poor-farm laundry for two years, for one dollar and a half a week, with my one available hand and what little I could do with the other, sorting dirty clothes and folding sheets and pillow-slips until I thought a thousand times my poor old back would break in two, and until I knew a million times the location in my chest of every fraction of an inch of my missing ribs.”

“You are a young man yet—­”

Daughtry grinned denial as he rubbed his grizzled mat of hair.

“You are a young man yet, steward,” the Ancient Mariner insisted with a show of irritation.  “You have never been shut out from life.  In the poor-farm one is shut out from life.  There is no respect—­no, not for age alone, but for human life in the poor-house.  How shall I say it?  One is not dead.  Nor is one alive.  One is what once was alive and is in process of becoming dead.  Lepers are treated that way.  So are the insane.  I know it.  When I was young and on the sea, a brother-lieutenant went mad.  Sometimes he was violent, and we struggled with him, twisting his arms, bruising his flesh, tying him helpless while we sat and panted on him that he might not do harm to us, himself, or the ship.  And he, who still lived, died to us.  Don’t you understand?  He was no longer of us, like us.  He was something other.  That is it—­other.  And so, in the poor-farm, we, who are yet unburied, are other.  You have heard me chatter about the hell of the longboat.  That is a pleasant diversion in life compared with the poor-farm.  The food, the filth, the abuse, the bullying, the—­the sheer animalness of it!