I was a boy divided in two.  One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm of his own weaving, and the other part was a commonplace and protesting inhabitant of a world of lessons, disappointments and discipline.  My instincts were not vicious.  Ideas bubbled up within me continually from an apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of the longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents:  what I seem to see most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless struggle for self-expression, for self-development, against the inertia of a tradition of which my father was the embodiment.  He was an enigma to me then.  He sincerely loved me, he cherished ambitions concerning me, yet thwarted every natural, budding growth, until I grew unconsciously to regard him as my enemy, although I had an affection for him and a pride in him that flared up at times.  Instead of confiding to him my aspirations, vague though they were, I became more and more secretive as I grew older.  I knew instinctively that he regarded these aspirations as evidences in my character of serious moral flaws.  And I would sooner have suffered many afternoons of his favourite punishment—­solitary confinement in my room—­than reveal to him those occasional fits of creative fancy which caused me to neglect my lessons in order to put them on paper.  Loving literature, in his way, he was characteristically incapable of recognizing the literary instinct, and the symptoms of its early stages he mistook for inherent frivolity, for lack of respect for the truth; in brief, for original sin.  At the age of fourteen I had begun secretly (alas, how many things I did secretly!) to write stories of a sort, stories that never were finished.

He regarded reading as duty, not pleasure.  He laid out books for me, which I neglected.  He was part and parcel of that American environment in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness.  And no one who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the new generation into its religious and commercial moulds.  Shall we ever, I wonder, develop the enlightened education that will know how to take advantage of such initiative as was mine? that will be on the watch for it, sympathize with it and guide it to fruition?

I was conscious of still another creative need, that of dramatizing my ideas, of converting them into action.  And this need was to lead me farther than ever afield from the path of righteousness.  The concrete realization of ideas, as many geniuses will testify, is an expensive undertaking, requiring a little pocket money; and I have already touched upon that subject.  My father did not believe in pocket money.  A sea story that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave me at Christmas inspired me to compose one of a somewhat different nature; incidentally, I deemed it a vast improvement on Cousin Donald’s book.  Now, if I only had a boat, with the assistance of Ham Durrett and