a wistful distance. Would I
take Scotty, the runaway sailor, to visit the harpooner, on the
opium-smuggler Idler? WOULD I!

The harpooner came on deck to answer our hail, and invited us aboard. I
played the sailor and the man, fending off the skiff so that it would not
mar the yacht's white paint, dropping the skiff astern on a long painter,
and making the painter fast with two nonchalant half-hitches.

We went below. It was the first sea-interior I had ever seen. The
clothing on the wall smelled musty. But what of that? Was it not the
sea-gear of men?--leather jackets lined with corduroy, blue coats of
pilot cloth, sou'westers, sea-boots, oilskins. And everywhere was in
evidence the economy of space--the narrow bunks, the swinging tables, the
incredible lockers. There were the tell-tale compass, the sea-lamps in
their gimbals, the blue-backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away,
the signal-flags in alphabetical order, and a mariner's dividers jammed
into the woodwork to hold a calendar. At last I was living. Here I sat,
inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as a comrade by a harpooner
and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty.

The first thing that the harpooner, aged nineteen, and the sailor, aged
seventeen, did to show that they were men was to behave like men. The
harpooner suggested the eminent desirableness of a drink, and Scotty
searched his pockets for dimes and nickels. Then the harpooner carried
away a pink flask to be filled in some blind pig, for there were no
licensed saloons in that locality. We drank the cheap rotgut out of
tumblers. Was I any the less strong, any the less valiant, than the
harpooner and the sailor? They were men. They proved it by the way they
drank. Drink was the badge of manhood. So I drank with them, drink by
drink, raw and straight, though the damned stuff couldn't compare with a
stick of chewing taffy or a delectable "cannon-ball." I shuddered and
swallowed my gorge with every drink, though I manfully hid all such
symptoms.

Divers times we filled the flask that afternoon. All I had was twenty
cents, but I put it up like a man, though with secret regret at the
enormous store of candy it could have bought. The liquor mounted in the
heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon
running the Easting down, gales off the Horn and pamperos off the Plate,
lower topsail breezes, southerly busters, North Pacific gales, a