sitated because I was afraid.

"'When shall I start?' I asked after a while.

"'The _Corydon's_ in the river now,' said my uncle. 'They want a Fourth:
can you get down to-night?'

"'To-night!' I said. 'I've not given notice yet!'

"'Phone from here,' he says.

"'But I've nothing packed,' I whimpered. And he laughed.

"I know now why he laughed. Partly because a landsman is always rather a
comic figure to a sailor, partly because he knew how I had been brought
up. He had never agreed with the theory of gentility which had taken
such a hold of my mother. He was as out of place in his Surbiton home as
a bear in a back-yard. His daughters, my cousins, couldn't make him see
the importance, in England, of gentility. When he and my father and all
the rest of them had been boys on that New England farm, they had had to
clear stones off the land. No stones, no dinner. And now he had a house
in Surbiton, and was laughing at me, who had never lifted a stone in my
life. Even in the works where I was a pupil we had always had a little
private lavatory to wash and change in. He laughed at me. He believed
one trip would be enough for me. He didn't believe for a minute that I
would stick to it.

"But I was making up my mind. Somehow or other, in spite of my
twenty-five years in cotton-wool, I had imagination enough to see in my
uncle's weather-beaten old face something that was not in the city
faces I saw every day. He had come into London out of an alien world.
Then, I argued, there are other worlds beside this one! I had not
realized it before! All the time I was snug in my little job in Victoria
Street men were out on the sea, out in the heat and cold and wet, living
in a totally different world to mine. You may think it a foolish and
common enough idea, but to me it was dazzling, blinding. It took hold of
me. I could think of nothing else. I said, 'I'll go, but I can't go
to-night, I've nothing to wear.' So my uncle told me to go to Cardiff
and meet the _Corydon_ at Barry Dock.

"'What's she like?' I said, standing up. He took me into another office,
and showed me a beautiful model of a steamer.

"'There she is,' he says. 'That's the old _Corydon_. I commanded her for
three years.' I can tell you I was pleased to think I was going to sea
in such a fine ship. Humph!

"I went home and had a talk with my mother. All _her_ ideas were
capsized too. Here was her eldest son, the quiet, studious, respectable
elder son, out of e