nd of
smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice.

"You can't swim in that ice water," said the harpooner confidentially to
me. "You double up in a minute and go down. When a whale smashes your
boat, the thing to do is to get your belly across an oar, so that when
the cold doubles you you'll float."

"Sure," I said, with a grateful nod and an air of certitude that I, too,
would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic Ocean. And,
truly, I registered his advice as singularly valuable information, and
filed it away in my brain, where it persists to this day.

But I couldn't talk--at first. Heavens! I was only fourteen, and had
never been on the ocean in my life. I could only listen to the two
sea-dogs, and show my manhood by drinking with them, fairly and squarely,
drink and drink.

The liquor worked its will with me; the talk of Scotty and the harpooner
poured through the pent space of the Idler's cabin and through my brain
like great gusts of wide, free wind; and in imagination I lived my years
to come and rocked over the wild, mad, glorious world on multitudinous
adventures.

We unbent. Our inhibitions and taciturnities vanished. We were as if we
had known each other for years and years, and we pledged ourselves to
years of future voyagings together. The harpooner told of misadventures
and secret shames. Scotty wept over his poor old mother in Edinburgh--a
lady, he insisted, gently born--who was in reduced circumstances, who had
pinched herself to pay the lump sum to the ship-owners for his
apprenticeship, whose sacrificing dream had been to see him a merchantman
officer and a gentleman, and who was heartbroken because he had deserted
his ship in Australia and joined another as a common sailor before the
mast. And Scotty proved it. He drew her last sad letter from his pocket
and wept over it as he read it aloud. The harpooner and I wept with him,
and swore that all three of us would ship on the whaleship Bonanza, win a
big pay-day, and, still together, make a pilgrimage to Edinburgh and lay
our store of money in the dear lady's lap.

And, as John Barleycorn heated his way into my brain, thawing my
reticence, melting my modesty, talking through me and with me and as me,
my adopted twin brother and alter ego, I, too, raised my voice to show
myself a man and an adventurer, and bragged in detail and at length of
how I had crossed San Francisco Bay in my open skiff in a roaring
southwester when even th