What comes after is about the most unpleasant
time for a youngster, the trying to get an officer's berth with nothing
much to show but a brand-new certificate. It is surprising how useless
you find that piece of ass's skin that you have been putting yourself in
such a state about. It didn't strike me at the time that a Board of
Trade certificate does not make an officer, not by a long long way. But
the skippers of the ships I was haunting with demands for a job knew
that very well. I don't wonder at them now, and I don't blame them
either. But this `trying to get a ship' is pretty hard on a youngster
all the same..."

He went on then to tell us how tired he was and how discouraged by this
lesson of disillusion following swiftly upon the finest day of his life.
He told us how he went the round of all the ship-owners' offices in the
City where some junior clerk would furnish him with printed forms of
application which he took home to fill up in the evening. He used to
run out just before midnight to post them in the nearest pillar-box.
And that was all that ever came of it. In his own words: he might just
as well have dropped them all properly addressed and stamped into the
sewer grating.

Then one day, as he was wending his weary way to the docks, he met a
friend and former shipmate a little older than himself outside the
Fenchurch Street Railway Station.

He craved for sympathy but his friend had just "got a ship" that very
morning and was hurrying home in a state of outward joy and inward
uneasiness usual to a sailor who after many days of waiting suddenly
gets a berth. This friend had the time to condole with him but briefly.
He must be moving. Then as he was running off, over his shoulder as it
were, he suggested: "Why don't you go and speak to Mr Powell in the
Shipping Office." Our friend objected that he did not know Mr Powell
from Adam. And the other already pretty near round the corner shouted
back advice: "Go to the private door of the Shipping Office and walk
right up to him. His desk is by the window. Go up boldly and say I
sent you."

Our new acquaintance looking from one to the other of us declared: "Upon
my word, I had grown so desperate that I'd have gone boldly up to the
devil himself on the mere hint that he had a second mate's job to give
away."

It was at this point that interrupting his flow of talk to light his
pipe but holding us with his eye he inquired whether we had known
Powe