he room.

"I have heard the sailors sing," I said, "ever since I was a little kid
out there in the garden." I scowled in the effort to search my soul, my
artist's soul. "Yes," I added triumphantly, "and sometimes it brought a
lump in my throat!"

"Ah! Now you are a musician!"

"I will see what I can do," I said.

So again I tackled the harbor. By day it was quite impossible, all toots
and blares, the most frightful discords--but at night its vulgar
loudness was toned down sufficiently so that a fellow with artist's ears
could really stand listening to its life, especially if I did not go too
close but listened from my window. Here with uglier sounds subdued I
could catch low voices, snatches of song and now and then a chorus. "The
folk songs of the Seven Seas!" How that phrase took hold of me!

I went for information to an old dock watchman who had been a sailor.

"Songs? Why sure!" he answered. "It must be the chanties ye mean."

"Chanties?"

"That's it. I've been told the word's French."

"Oh! Chanter!"

"No--chanty. An' the man that sings the verses, he's called the
chantyman. He sings while the crew heaves on the ropes an' they all come
in on the chorus. If he's a real good chantyman he makes up new verses
every time, a kind of a yarn he spins while he sings."

Soon after this, toward the end of a warm, windy April night, I awoke
and heard them singing. I jumped up and went to my window. From the dock
next to my father's, over the line of warehouse roofs, I could see the
immense white sails already slowly rising into the starlit night.
Quickly I threw on some clothes and hurried down to the docks. The
waterfront was empty, swept clean of all that I disliked. Only overhead
a few billowy clouds, the soft rush of the wind, a slight flush in the
east, it was almost dawn. Here and there gleamed a light, red, green or
yellow, with a phantom tug or barge around it, moving over the black of
the water. Not silence but something richer was here--the confused
mysterious murmuring, the creaking and the breathing of the sleeping
port. And out of this those voices singing.

I drew nearer slowly. Hungrily I tried to take in the details of color
and sound. And I felt suddenly such a deep delight as I had never
dreamed of. To look around and listen and gather it into me and
remember. This was great, no doubt about it--it fitted into all that was
fine!

"This is really what I want to do--I'd like to learn to do it wel