was to lead me
farther than ever afield from the path of righteousness. The concrete
realization of ideas, as many geniuses will testify, is an expensive
undertaking, requiring a little pocket money; and I have already touched
upon that subject. My father did not believe in pocket money. A sea story
that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave me at Christmas inspired me to compose
one of a somewhat different nature; incidentally, I deemed it a vast
improvement on Cousin Donald's book. Now, if I only had a boat, with the
assistance of Ham Durrett and Tom Peters, Gene Hollister and Perry
Blackwood and other friends, this story of mine might be staged. There
were, however, as usual, certain seemingly insuperable difficulties: in
the first place, it was winter time; in the second, no facilities existed
in the city for operations of a nautical character; and, lastly, my
Christmas money amounted only to five dollars. It was my father who
pointed out these and other objections. For, after a careful perusal of
the price lists I had sent for, I had been forced to appeal to him to
supply additional funds with which to purchase a row-boat. Incidentally,
he read me a lecture on extravagance, referred to my last month's report
at the Academy, and finished by declaring that he would not permit me to
have a boat even in the highly improbable case of somebody's presenting
me with one. Let it not be imagined that my ardour or my determination
were extinguished. Shortly after I had retired from his presence it
occurred to me that he had said nothing to forbid my making a boat, and
the first thing I did after school that day was to procure, for
twenty-five cents, a second-hand book on boat construction. The woodshed
was chosen as a shipbuilding establishment. It was convenient--and my
father never went into the back yard in cold weather. Inquiries of
lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four dollars and
seventy-five cents was inadequate to buy the material itself, to say
nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs, I reluctantly
abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched, and compromised
on a flat bottom. Observe how the ways of deception lead to
transgression: I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis, the
carpenter, a good-natured Englishman, coarse and fat: in our
neighbourhood his reputation for obscenity was so well known to mothers
that I had been forbidden to go near him or his shop. Grits Jarvis, his