mployment, while her harum-scarum disobedient Frank
was getting three hundred a year and with good prospects. She was all
bewildered by it. You can't blame her. She looked at me when I told her
what I was going to do. 'Take plenty of socks,' she said, quietly.
'You'll need them at sea.' And I suddenly remembered she'd done the very
same thing I was to do, long ago; broken out of her life and made a
fresh start--on the sea.

"And what had happened to me? You'll think I was a pretty cheap sort of
a lover to let my brother cut me out so easy as that. You'll say I never
really loved her. Who can tell that? Who can say how much or how little
he loves? Yes, yes, I loved her. But what, I ask you, is the use of a
man mooning his life away for a girl who has never given him a minute's
thought? It is a waste of time and energy and life. When that view of
worlds outside of mine broke on me the love-trance broke. I said to
myself: 'I am young; I will go out and see things.' Well, I went out and
I saw things, and I don't regret it. But there's one thing we never see
again, and that's the illusion of first love.

"I begged my mother to say nothing to Frank about me until I was gone,
and a day or two later I slipped away to Paddington with a couple of
grips and took the train to Barry Docks. It will give you an idea of the
quiet life I had led when I tell you this was my first long journey. I
had been to places within one hundred and fifty miles of London, but
never farther. I felt lost when they turned me out on the platform at
Barry in the rain and dark. A seaport is not a very attractive place to
a landsman.

"The next twenty-four hours were strenuous for me. More than once I
wondered if I could live through it. When I got to the dock I walked up
and down looking for a ship that resembled the model of the _Corydon_.
There weren't any. I asked a man in a blue frock-coat if the _Corydon_
had come in.

"'Aye,' says he. 'Here she is, just abaft of ye,' and he pointed to a
rusty, dirty old tub with a battered funnel and a bridge all blocked
with hatches. That the beautiful shiny _Corydon_? There was the name on
her stern--_Corydon, London_. She was loading coal from a big elevator.
Her decks were piled high with it, and where there wasn't coal there was
mud, black oozy mud, and ashes and ropes and soppy hatches. I climbed up
the ladder and one by one got my grips aboard. And I stood there in the
rain, my gloves all black with the co