at their Christmas theatricals.  But he may have reported me as being rough as well as ready, for her ladyship never ratified the invitation.  Not that I would have left home at Christmas, and not that I lacked pleasure in the holidays.  But other fashions of games and speech and boyish etiquette lay between me and Jem; hospitality, if not choice, kept him closely with his school-fellows, and neither they nor he had part in the day-dreams of my soul.

For the spell of the Penny Numbers had not grown weaker as I grew older.  In the holidays I came back to them as to friends.  At school they made the faded maps on Snuffy’s dirty walls alive with visions, and many a night as I lay awake with pain and over-weariness in the stifling dormitory, my thoughts took refuge not in dreams of home nor in castles of the air, but in phantom ships that sailed for ever round the world.

The day of the interview with my father I roused myself from my grievances to consider a more practical question.  Why should I not go to sea?  No matter whose fault it was, there was no doubt that I was ill-educated, and that I did not please my father as Jem did.  On the other hand I was strong and hardy, nimble and willing to obey; and I had roughed it enough, in all conscience.  I must have ill luck indeed, if I lit upon a captain more cruel than Mr. Crayshaw.  I did not know exactly how it was to be accomplished, but I knew enough to know that I could not aim at the Royal Navy.  Of course I should have preferred it.  I had never seen naval officers, but if they were like officers in the army, like Colonel Jervois, for instance, it was with such a port and bearing that I would fain have carried myself when I grew up to be a man.  I guessed, however, that money and many other considerations might make it impossible for me to be a midshipman; but I had heard of boys being apprenticed to merchant-vessels, and I resolved to ask my father if he would so apprentice me.

He refused, and he accompanied his refusal with an unfavourable commentary on my character and conduct, which was not the less bitter because the accusations were chiefly general.

This sudden fancy for the sea—­well, if it were not a sudden fancy, but a dream of my life, what a painful instance it afforded of my habitual want of frankness!—­This long-concealed project which I had suddenly brought to the surface—­I had talked about it to my mother years ago, had I, but it had distressed her, and even to my father, but he had snubbed me?—­then I had been deliberately fostering aims and plans to which I had always known that my parents would be opposed.  My father didn’t believe a word of it.  It was the old story.  I must be peculiar at any price.  I must have something new to amuse me, and be unlike the rest of the family.  It was always the same.  For years I had found more satisfaction from the conversation of a man who had spent ten years of his life in the hulks than from that of my own father.  Then this