Then he headed for Cortlandt Street; for Long Island, City. finally, the Navy Yard.  Along his way were the docks of the tramp steamers where he might ship as steward in the all-promising Sometime.  He had never done anything so reckless as actually to ask a skipper for the chance to go a-sailing, but he had once gone into a mission society’s free shipping-office on West Street where a disapproving elder had grumped at him, “Are you a sailor?  No?  Can’t do anything for you, my friend.  Are you saved?” He wasn’t going to risk another horror like that, yet when the golden morning of Sometime dawned he certainly was going to go cruising off to palm-bordered lagoons.

As he walked through Long Island City he contrived conversations with the sailors he passed.  It would have surprised a Norwegian bos’un’s mate to learn that he was really a gun-runner, and that, as a matter of fact, he was now telling yarns of the Spanish Main to the man who slid deprecatingly by him.

Mr. Wrenn envied the jackies on the training-ship and carelessly went to sea as the President’s guest in the admiral’s barge and was frightened by the stare of a sauntering shop-girl and arrived home before dusk, to Mrs. Zapp’s straitened approval.

Dusk made incantations in his third-floor-front.  Pleasantly fagged in those slight neat legs, after his walk, Mr. Wrenn sat in the wicker rocker by the window, patting his scrubby tan mustache and reviewing the day’s wandering.  When the gas was lighted he yearned over pictures in a geographical magazine for a happy hour, then yawned to himself, “Well-l-l, Willum, guess it’s time to crawl into the downy.”

He undressed and smoothed his ready-made suit on the rocking-chair back.  Sitting on the edge of his bed, quaint in his cotton night-gown, like a rare little bird of dull plumage, he rubbed his head sleepily.  Um-m-m-m-m!  How tired he was!  He went to open the window.  Then his tamed heart leaped into a waltz, and he forgot third-floor-fronts and sleepiness.

Through the window came the chorus of fog-horns on North River.  “Boom-m-m!” That must be a giant liner, battling up through the fog. (It was a ferry.) A liner!  She’d be roaring just like that if she were off the Banks!  If he were only off the Banks!  “Toot!  Toot!” That was a tug.  “Whawn-n-n!” Another liner.  The tumultuous chorus repeated to him all the adventures of the day.

He dropped upon the bed again and stared absently at his clothes.  Out of the inside coat pocket stuck the unopened letter from Cousin John.

He read a paragraph of it.  He sprang from the bed and danced a tarantella, pranced in his cottony nightgown like a drunken Yaqui.  The letter announced that the flinty farm at Parthenon, left to Mr. Wrenn by his father, had been sold.  Its location on a river bluff had made it valuable to the Parthenon Chautauqua Association.  There was now to his credit in the Parthenon National Bank nine hundred and forty dollars!