Tom Peters, Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and other friends, this story of mine might be staged.  There were, however, as usual, certain seemingly insuperable difficulties:  in the first place, it was winter time; in the second, no facilities existed in the city for operations of a nautical character; and, lastly, my Christmas money amounted only to five dollars.  It was my father who pointed out these and other objections.  For, after a careful perusal of the price lists I had sent for, I had been forced to appeal to him to supply additional funds with which to purchase a row-boat.  Incidentally, he read me a lecture on extravagance, referred to my last month’s report at the Academy, and finished by declaring that he would not permit me to have a boat even in the highly improbable case of somebody’s presenting me with one.  Let it not be imagined that my ardour or my determination were extinguished.  Shortly after I had retired from his presence it occurred to me that he had said nothing to forbid my making a boat, and the first thing I did after school that day was to procure, for twenty-five cents, a second-hand book on boat construction.  The woodshed was chosen as a shipbuilding establishment.  It was convenient—­and my father never went into the back yard in cold weather.  Inquiries of lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four dollars and seventy-five cents was inadequate to buy the material itself, to say nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs, I reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched, and compromised on a flat bottom.  Observe how the ways of deception lead to transgression:  I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis, the carpenter, a good-natured Englishman, coarse and fat:  in our neighbourhood his reputation for obscenity was so well known to mothers that I had been forbidden to go near him or his shop.  Grits Jarvis, his son, who had inherited the talent, was also contraband.  I can see now the huge bulk of the elder Jarvis as he stood in the melting, soot-powdered snow in front of his shop, and hear his comments on my pertinacity.

“If you ever wants another man’s missus when you grows up, my lad, Gawd ’elp ’im!”

“Why should I want another man’s wife when I don’t want one of my own?” I demanded, indignant.

He laughed with his customary lack of moderation.

“You mind what old Jarvis says,” he cried.  “What you wants, you gets.”

I did get his boards, by sheer insistence.  No doubt they were not very valuable, and without question he more than made up for them in my mother’s bill.  I also got something else of equal value to me at the moment,—­the assistance of Grits, the contraband; daily, after school, I smuggled him into the shed through the alley, acquiring likewise the services of Tom Peters, which was more of a triumph than it would seem.  Tom always had to be “worked up” to participation in my ideas, but in the end he almost invariably succumbed.  The notion of building a boat in the dead of winter, and so far from her native element, naturally struck him at first as ridiculous.  Where in Jehoshaphat was I going to sail it if I ever got it made?  He much preferred to throw snowballs at innocent wagon drivers.