that comes
handy. But when he was sober he was a good old fellow. He took me round
to the Sailors' Home in Salthouse Lane, and introduced me to the man who
ran it. I stayed there six weeks.

The Sailors' Home as an institution is not over-popular with seamen,
especially with the more improvident of them. And the improvident are
certainly ninety per cent. of the total sea-going race of man. As a rule
Homes cease to be such when a man's money is done. He is thrown out into
the street or into some equivalent of the notorious Straw House. There
is always much talk at sea about the relative advantages of
Boarding-Houses and Homes, and half the arguments about the subject end
in more or less of a "rough house" and a few odd black eyes. However
rude and brutal the boarding-house master may be, however much of a
daylight robber he is (and they mostly are "daylight robbers") it is to
his advantage to make his house popular. There is no surer way of doing
this than ensuring his boarder a ship at the end of his short spree on
shore. In many Homes the men look after this themselves. Jack is a
child and wants to be looked after. As far as the Home in Salthouse Lane
went, I think it combined some of the better qualities of both the
common resorts of men ashore. The boss of it knew something about
seamen; he was certainly not a robber, and he kept me and several others
when we did not possess a red cent among us to jingle on a tombstone. He
also kept order, for he had had some experience as a prize-fighter, and
could put the best of us on the floor at a moment's notice. Once or
twice he did so, and peace reigned in Warsaw.

There were certainly very few of us in the Home. Hull was not quite as
full of sailors as hell is of devils, as a boarding-house master once
assured me that San Francisco was when I tried to get taken into his
house after being rejected even less politely by that eminent scoundrel
Shanghai Brown. Besides myself there were a sturdy blue-nose or
Nova-Scotian; a long-limbed, slab-sided herring-back or native of New
Brunswick, a big thick-headed ass of an Englishman and a smart thief of
a Cockney, known to us all as Ginger. We lived together without
quarrelling more than three times a day. This we thought was peace. It
was certainly more peaceful than my last boarding-house at
Williamstown, where we had a little bloodshed every night. But there the
very tables and benches were clamped to the floor; the windows were to