rs as he starts the evaporator
and adjusts the vapour-cock. He is taking the temperatures for the
last time. He is going up to South Shields for his "tickut," by which
he means a first-class certificate of competency issued by the Board
of Trade. That is George the Fourth's utmost ambition. He is a man
then; he is licensed to take any steamer of any tonnage into any sea
on the chart. He has, moreover, a certain prestige, has this skylarky
youth, when he gets his "chief's tickut." Ladies who preside over
saloon bars will try to lure him into matrimony. He will grow (I
hope) a little steadier, and fall really and truly in love.

My colleague the Second, he intends to work ashore and sleep at home.
The clergyman's daughter, I imagine, will come more and more into the
scheme of things, and the mother he loves so well will give him her
blessing. So each, you see, has a clearly defined plan, while I drift
along, planless, ambitionless, smoking many pipes. I have been trying
to think out something practicable. Am I to drift always about the
world, a mere piece of flotsam on Swansea tide? Or am I to sit down
once more in Chelsea, hand and brain running to seed, while the world
spins on outside? I must think out a plan. And I must school myself to
cancel all plans beginning "If she will--if only." Why cannot I rise
to some decent sense of self-respect, to say, as says the man in "The
Last Ride Together":

"_Take back the hope you gave,--I claim
Only a memory of the same._"

That's manly--pre-eminently English, in fact. But, meanwhile, I drift
planless.

The mighty Norseman, too, in his own sinewy Hyperborean style, is full
of joy. His jolly pasty face beams joyously upon me. He will be
"a passenger for one quid" from London to Gothenburg, thence to
Stockholm, and Marianna. The engine-room is bulging, in places, with
the contraband goods he is bringing home for Marianna. Pieces of silk
"for the Signorina," as the handsome old huxter-lady at Canary purrs
in our ears; bottles of Florida water, mule canaries, and Herrick's
own divine Canary Sack, to which he so often bade "farewell." All
these for the dainty maiden who indulges in German Script. God speed
you, oh, mighty Norseman! May your frescoed bosom never prove
unfaithful to your grey-eyed maiden. I, at least, have been the better
for having known you--a ship passing in the night.

And so we come to the Mumble Head.

XXVII

Paid off, free for the aft