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 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 Jarv