I leave them on the perilous
adventure of dinner! So this relish of hemp and tar must be a legacy from
a far-off time--a dim atavism, to put it as hard as possible--for I seem
to remember being told that my ancestors were once engaged in buccaneering
or other valiant livelihood.

But here is a peculiar thing. The chandlery gives me no desire to run away
to sea. Rather, the smell of the place urges me indeterminately,
diffusedly, to truantry. It offers me no particular chart. It but cuts my
moorings for whatever winds are blowing. If there be blood of a pirate in
me, it is a shame what faded juice it is. It would flow pink on the
sticking. In mean contrast to skulls, bowie-knives and other red villainy,
my thoughts will be set toward the mild truantry of trudging for an
afternoon in the country. Or it is likely that I'll carry stones for the
castle that I have been this long time building. Were the trick of prosody
in me, I would hew a poem on the spot. Such is my anemia. And yet there is
a touch of valiancy, too, as from the days when my sainted ancestors
sailed with their glass beads from Bristol harbor; the desire of visiting
the sunset, of sailing down on the far side of the last horizon where the
world itself falls off and there is sky with swirl of stars beyond.

[Illustration]

In the spring of each year everyone should go to Bagdad--not particularly
to Bagdad, for I shall not dictate in matter of detail--but to any such
town that may happen to be so remote that you are not sure when you look
it up whether it is on page 47 which is Asia, or on page 53 which is
Persia. But Bagdad will serve: For surely, Reader, you have not forgotten
that it was in Bagdad in the surprising reign of Haroun-al-Raschid that
Sinbad the Sailor lived! Nor can it have escaped you that scarce a mule's
back distance--such was the method of computation in those golden
days--lived that prince of medieval plain-clothes men, Ali Baba!

Historically, Bagdad lies in that tract of earth where purple darkens into
night. Geographically, it lies obliquely downward, and is, I compute,
considerably off the southeast corner of my basement. It is such distant
proximity, doubtless, that renders my basement--and particularly its
woodpile, which lies obscurely beyond the laundry--such a shadowy, grim
and altogether mysterious place. If there be any part of the house,
including certain dark corners of the attic, that is fearfully
Mesopotamian after night