s, after that, some drinks. I needed the clothes. All I possessed
were on me, and they were as follows: a pair of sea-boots that
providentially leaked the water out as fast as it ran in, a pair of
fifty-cent overalls, a forty-cent cotton shirt, and a sou'wester. I had
no hat, so I had to wear the sou'wester, and it will be noted that I have
listed neither underclothes nor socks. I didn't own any.

To reach the stores where clothes could be bought, we had to pass a dozen
saloons. So I bought me the drinks first. I never got to the clothing
stores. In the morning, broke, poisoned, but contented, I came back on
board, and we set sail. I possessed only the clothes I had gone ashore
in, and not a cent remained of the one hundred and eighty dollars. It
might well be deemed impossible, by those who have never tried it, that
in twelve hours a lad can spend all of one hundred and eighty dollars for
drinks. I know otherwise.

And I had no regrets. I was proud. I had shown them I could spend with
the best of them. Amongst strong men I had proved myself strong. I had
clinched again, as I had often clinched, my right to the title of
"Prince." Also, my attitude may be considered, in part, as a reaction
from my childhood's meagreness and my childhood's excessive toil.
Possibly my inchoate thought was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a
prince than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an
hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending
of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage,
then I'd like to know what is.

Oh, I skip much of the details of my trafficking with John Barleycorn
during this period, and shall only mention events that will throw light
on John Barleycorn's ways. There were three things that enabled me to
pursue this heavy drinking: first, a magnificent constitution far better
than the average; second, the healthy open-air life on the water; and
third, the fact that I drank irregularly. While out on the water, we
never carried any drink along.

The world was opening up to me. Already I knew several hundred miles of
the water-ways of it, and of the towns and cities and fishing hamlets on
the shores. Came the whisper to range farther. I had not found it yet.
There was more behind. But even this much of the world was too wide for
Nelson. He wearied for his beloved Oakland water-front, and when he
elected to return to it we sepa