Yucatan. And do you know, at the end, I slept in Bowery
lodging-houses and ate scrapple in East-Side feeding-dens, and, on more
than one occasion, stood in the bread-line at midnight and pondered
whether or not I should faint before I fed."

"And you never squealed to your family," Dag Daughtry murmured admiringly
in the pause.

The Ancient Mariner straightened up his shoulders, threw his head back,
then bowed it and repeated, "No, I never squealed. I went into the poor-
house, or the county poor-farm as they call it. I lived sordidly. I
lived like a beast. For six months I lived like a beast, and then I saw
my way out. I set about building the _Wide Awake_. I built her plank by
plank, and copper-fastened her, selected her masts and every timber of
her, and personally signed on her full ship's complement fore-and-aft,
and outfitted her amongst the Jews, and sailed with her to the South Seas
and the treasure buried a fathom under the sand.

"You see," he explained, "all this I did in my mind, for all the time I
was a hostage in the poor-farm of broken men."

The Ancient Mariner's face grew suddenly bleak and fierce, and his right
hand flashed out to Daughtry's wrist, prisoning it in withered fingers of
steel.

"It was a long, hard way to get out of the poor-farm and finance my
miserable little, pitiful little, adventure of the _Wide Awake_. Do you
know that I worked in the poor-farm laundry for two years, for one dollar
and a half a week, with my one available hand and what little I could do
with the other, sorting dirty clothes and folding sheets and pillow-slips
until I thought a thousand times my poor old back would break in two, and
until I knew a million times the location in my chest of every fraction
of an inch of my missing ribs."

"You are a young man yet--"

Daughtry grinned denial as he rubbed his grizzled mat of hair.

"You are a young man yet, steward," the Ancient Mariner insisted with a
show of irritation. "You have never been shut out from life. In the
poor-farm one is shut out from life. There is no respect--no, not for
age alone, but for human life in the poor-house. How shall I say it? One
is not dead. Nor is one alive. One is what once was alive and is in
process of becoming dead. Lepers are treated that way. So are the
insane. I know it. When I was young and on the sea, a
brother-lieutenant went mad. Sometimes he was violent, and we struggled
with him, twisting his arms,