It isn’t any use for me to talk about the voyage, because I can have no faith in that voyage till the ship is under way.  How do I know she will ever sail?  My passage is paid, and if the ship sails, I sail in her—­but I make no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing —­have made no preparation whatever—­shall not pack my trunk till the morning we sail.  Yet my hands are full of what I am going to do the day before we sail—­and what isn’t done that day will go undone.

All I do know or feel, is, that I am wild with impatience to move—­move —­move!  Half a dozen times I have wished I had sailed long ago in some ship that wasn’t going to keep me chained here to chafe for lagging ages while she got ready to go.  Curse the endless delays!  They always kill me—­they make me neglect every duty and then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast.  I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.  I do more mean things, the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and sit down than ever I can get forgiveness for.

Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach’s next Thursday night, and I suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in swallow-tails, white kids and everything en regle.

I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson’s or anybody else’s supervision.  I don’t mind it.  I am fixed.  I have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless room-mate who is as good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived—­a man whose blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to all who shall come within their influence.  But send on the professional preachers—­there are none I like better to converse with.  If they’re not narrow minded and bigoted they make good companions.

I asked them to send the N. Y. Weekly to you—­no charge.  I am not going
to write for it.  Like all other, papers that pay one splendidly it
circulates among stupid people and the ‘canaille.’  I have made no
arrangement with any New York paper—­I will see about that Monday or
Tuesday. 
                              Love to all
                                   Good bye,
                                        Yrs affy
          
                                        Sam.

     The “immoral” room-mate whose conduct was to be an “eloquent
     example” was Dan Slote, immortalized in the Innocents as “Dan”
     —­a favorite on the ship, and later beloved by countless readers.

There is one more letter, written the night before the Quaker City sailed-a letter which in a sense marks the close of the first great period of his life—­the period of aimless wandering—­adventure —­youth.

Perhaps a paragraph of explanation should precede this letter.  Political changes had eliminated Orion in Nevada, and he was now undertaking the practice of law.  “Bill Stewart” was Senator Stewart, of Nevada, of whom we shall