ks, the whine of wheels, the clang of
bells, deep blasts and bellows from steamers. And closer still, from
that "vile saloon" directly under the garden, I could hear wild shouts
and songs and roars of laughter that came, I learned, not only from
dockers, but from "stokers" and "drunken sailors," men who lived right
inside the ships and would soon be starting for heathen lands!

"I wonder how I'd feel," I would think, "if I were out in the garden
now--out in the dark all by myself--right above that vile saloon!"

This would always scare me so that I would bury my head in the covers
and shake. But I often did this, for I liked to be scared. It was a game
I had all by myself with the harbor.

* * * * *

And yet this old man in the pulpit called it a place where you went to
rest!

Twenty-five years have gone since then, and all that I can remember now
of anything Henry Ward Beecher said was this--that once, just once, I
heard him speak of something that I knew about, and that when he did he
was wrong.

And though all the years since then have been for me one long story of a
harbor, restless, heaving, changing, always changing--it has never
changed for me in this--it has never seemed a haven where ships come to
dock, but always a place from which ships start out--into the storms and
the fogs of the seas, over the "ocean" to "heathen lands." For so I saw
it when I was a child, the threshold of adventures.

CHAPTER II

As I walked home from church with my mother that day the streets seemed
as quiet and safe as her eyes. How suddenly tempting it seemed to me,
this quiet and this safety, compared to the place where I was going. For
I had decided to run away from my home and my mother that afternoon,
down to the harbor to see the world. What would become of me 'way down
there? What would she do if I never came back? A lump rose in my throat
at the thought of her tears. It was terrible.

"All the same I am going to do it," I kept thinking doggedly. And yet
suddenly, as we reached our front steps, how near I came to telling her.
But no, she would only spoil it all. She wanted me always up in the
garden, she wanted me never to have any thrills.

My mother knew me so well. She had seen that when she read stories of
fairies, witches and goblins out of my books to Sue and me, while Sue,
though two years younger, would sit there like a little dark imp, her
black eyes snapping over the f