A Boy's Ambitions

( Originally Published 1912 )

AS A beginning, let me recall the famous old seaport in which he was born.

Whole neighbourhoods of that town were inhabited by sea-faring people and the commonest talk was about ships. The granite basins of the docks, the finest in the world, were full of them in shapes that steam was only beginning to displace: clippers and other full-rigged craft, barques and barkentines, brigs and brigantines, trafficking with the ends of the earth, all smelling of tea, coffee, palm oil, sugar, spice, hides cocoanuts, cotton, spruce or pine. They came in on an eighteen-foot tide and departed on the flood with their crews singing chanties as they trotted round the old-fashioned, handle-barred capstan. The steam windlass was in the future, and the captain, and the men too, would have looked upon the auxiliary engine with as much disdain as upon kid gloves and scented handkerchiefs. Gales were always blowing and when the moon was out it appeared to be whirling like a silvered cannon ball through the amber and dove-coloured clouds. All the smoke and soot of the chimneys could not expunge the salt in the air; it filled the nostrils and could be tasted on the lips; it was spread by the river, which, except for an hour or less at the turn of the tide, raced up and down as turbulently as the rapids below a cataract, making it necessary for the boats crossing it to steer a mile or so above their landings at the ebb and as far below their landings at the flood. There was exhilaration in it all, and the mad river reacted on the people, not making them as impetuous and restless as itself, but hardening them and strengthening them. They were not quick and high-keyed, but deliberate and plodding with extraordinary fortitude and pertinacity.

Now and then things happened which passed beyond the moment's wonder into history. We saw the Alabama sail from Birkenhead, some of us winking and some protesting, the latter a minority. Raphael Semmes, lean, sallow and nervous, much less like a mariner than a sea-lawyer, became the idol of an hour, and after-ward the Shenandoah arrived fresh from her postbellum depredations in Behring's Sea, her captain declaring to everybody's amusement that he did not know the war was over. I remember Punch's little joke with him, a cartoon depicting him landing and ingenuously asking, "Is Queen Anne dead?" The Great Eastern/ came, looming as big in comparison with the trans-Atlantic steamers of those days as a ship five times the size of the Mauretania would look now. She was beached and I walked under her keel, an atom in her shadow. The Cunarders and Inman liners, small as they were, entered port and left it with far more fuss than is made now over vessels of twelve times their tonnage. Cannon saluted them from the Rock Fort. An expedition to the Arctic or the Antarctic could not evoke more awe than did their departure on those staggering voyages to Boston and New York, which took them from twelve to twenty days. One night the town shook as in an earthquake. Windows crashed and every light went out. The Lottie Sleigh, anchored in the Sloyne, had exploded her cargo of gunpowder. The famous landing stage burned down! Thousands of Americans embark and disembark at that colossal floating pontoon, which, nearly all of iron and swung to the shore by hinged bridges, rises and falls with the tide. People agape had to see the ruins for themselves before they could believe it. As rumour it was as preposterous as the time-worn witticism of the Thames afire.

Are these events local and immaterial, and only preserved in provincial history and the memories of sentimental and garrulous townsmen? I think not. The Editor of "Haydn's Dictionary of Dates" does not ignore them any more than he ignores the Siege of Troy, the Rape of the Sabines, Hannibal and Caesar, the Armada or Trafalgar and Waterloo.

We were so concerned in it that the Civil War in America might have been at our doors and the Mersey running red from the carnage. Hard times smote us and passion surged high. The unemployed thronged the streets groaning and muttering at the corners. Usually they were overawed and sullen, but oftener than once they could stand no more and broke the bounds, and all the shops were closed and barred and shuttered. At my school we were a divided camp, the South far outnumbering the North. Under the banners of the unequal stars we fought desperately and resigned ourselves like Spartan children to the inglorious penalties that followed our subsequent slouch into the domestic circle with bleeding noses and mouths and blackened eyes. Bull Run, Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg were repeated, Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Gettysburg were reversed. History has made no note of it, but General Grant was a puffy, overgrown, blubbering fellow, who cried as he ran away, while General Lee was small, hard, and as lithe as a monkey.

Whatever happened, the high winds noisily, the low winds with suave and insidious persuasion, reiterated in every boy's ear the lure of the sea, and boomed a whispered "Come to me — Come to me — Adventure — Riches," though the boxes on the quays for small contributions to the missions bore the inscription, "There is sorrow on the sea"; and nearly every Sunday, while the wind howled as though it would bring down the steeple, we sang the hymn, "O hear us when we call to Thee."

Even away from the river and the docks we were reminded of it not only by talk but by the cabs carrying home the returned crews, all very jovial, all with jingling money in their pockets, and, more tempting than money, with the spoils of their voyages, big branches of uncrushed dates, pomegranates, green cocoanuts, monkeys, parrots and other birds with astonishing plumage and ridiculous faces. Many of my friends shipped as apprentices, and I nearly yielded to the call.

Retiring to an attic where there was an old trunk with a convex lid, I one day assumed command of a Cunarder and took her out to sea or warped her through the narrow dock-gates and berthed her alongside the shed. That is more trying than navigation in deep and open water, and I had never seen it accomplished without much vociferation and some profanity. I stood, master of my ship, on the bridge between the two paddle-boxes (in those primitive days the propeller was regarded as a precarious and untrustworthy innovation), huskily bawling my orders fore and aft, to which came ready answers, "Aye, aye, sir," and "Port it is," or "Starboard 'tis." All was going splendidly and without a scratch on the paint when a hawser snapped and we crushed into the dock-gate, on the port side, tearing away three feet of forward sponson. If profanity is ever pardonable it should have been forgiven then, but my mother opened the door of the attic and gently forced me down from the convex lid of the trunk on which I was bellowing. I was shorn of my dignity and authority just as a real captain falling under the displeasure of captious owners might be, but unlike him I was also shorn of an indispensable part of my clothing.

Our elders had little faith in moral suasion in those days, and whippings were frequent both at home and at school. The schoolmaster's cane could be robbed of some of its sting, however, if you secreted a hair in your palm before the cane swished down. Without knowing it, we were subjects of the ameliorating miracles of Christian Science.

While smarting and indignant, I threatened to run away to sea, and instead of deriding or threatening me, my mother said in a voice so level and impassive that it exasperated more than opposition could have done, "Why run away, dear? Let me know when you wish to go, and I will take care to have everything needful ready for you." She must have been a humourist. The statement of her willingness plucked from my many-hued romance all the feathers of its tail and wings.

I pondered the matter at tea-time when she conciliated my insurrection by giving me the "kissing crust" with plenty of butter on it. Probably not one in ten thou-sand unlucky moderns has the slightest idea of what the "kissing crust" is, and I pity them. The bread was made at home and sent out to the public bakery, where, if it was well-leavened, it rose high above the edges of the pan in the oven and overflowed into pendants like the most exquisite carvings or stalactites. These crisped and browned not into one shade of brown, but every shade of brown, and not only into brown but into gold. They were like the fan tracery in the vaulting of a cathedral, and inside them the bread was warm and white and sweeter than in any other part of the loaf.

The kissing crust soothed me while it lasted, but I clung to my opinion that the proper way of going to sea was stealthily by a Romeo's ladder made of strips of sheets and blankets, lowered in the "vast dead and middle of the night" from a bedroom window. Early in the morning you shipped for a voyage to San Francisco, Madagascar, New Guinea, Valparaiso or the White Sea. The bo's'ain patted you on the back and with his quid in his cheek recognized your metal at a glance. "The right sort, the right sort, my lad ! You don't come sneaking aboard like one of them pink-skinned, white-livered counter-skippers. You come through the hawsepipe, like a real sailor man, and no nonsense about you, eh? Now then ! Aloft, my hearty ! Aloft ! "

His pipe sounded like an eerie bird. A terrific gale blew, as you crossed the bar, and you were ahead of all the others in reaching the top-gallant. What a gale it was with the boiling sea running mountains high, and the wind like a swinging mallet pounding you till you could neither speak nor hear! Before your watch ended you were cold, weary and drenched to the skin, but then came the contrast of the warmth and light of the fo'c'sle, and the yarn-spinning of the old sea-dogs in your mess.

No healthy boy needs to be told that the spice of adventure is in hardship and difficulty. What lure was there in the picture in the boy's paper of a smug looking, foppish chap perched in the fo'c'stle head reading a copy of that otherwise interesting periodical, while the sails of his ship hung loose in the breathless doldrums. That didn't stir you a bit, but when the picture was of some seamy and leaky old tub, notorious for mishaps, lying dismasted and on her beam-ends off Cape Horn, with her drowned crew sported by the icy billows like dead fish, and bergs like Alps creeping toward her, you were frantic to be there. It made you long for the sea far more than did anything placid, comfortable and safe, even a coral island fringed with palms, though it must be admitted that when gesticulating and cannibalistic savages were added to the surf and exotic vegetation they were not without a charm of their own.

To the young the joy of life is in the scorn of it, and safety is the thought of only the timorous. "The spice of life is battle — and we wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity." Poe comprehended the superior incentive peril offers to imaginative and courageous boys, though his seamanship is, as in the case of Arthur Gordon Pym, never good enough for a certificate and occasionally spurious. His sloop booms along under the jib only after her mast has gone by the board ! Despite that absurdity, I can quote him in corroboration of my point. Speaking of his friend Augustus, Pym says: "He most strangely enlisted my feelings in behalf of the life of a seaman when he depicted its more terrible moments of suffering and despair. In the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears upon some gray and desolate rock in an ocean unapproachable and unknown." But the best presentation and confirmation of it are in Joseph Conrad's incomparable story, "Youth." No other writer of English ever interpreted the spirit of the sea and those who follow it with his acumen, and the paradox of the boy's inclination toward privation, mysterious as it is, has not eluded him.

I had some idea of discovering the Northwest Passage and discussed its possibilities with my father. I was a very restless boy. Nothing that I saw was ever at a standstill to my inner eye. The ships in the docks slipped their moorings while I gazed at them and re-appeared in far off rainbow-coloured seas and harbours. I could not pass the Nelson monument without having the gallant figure in bronze come down and win Trafalgar over again.

"You think you could stand the Arctic cold and darkness?" my father calmly asked. I thought that I should not object to them. What could be cosier than the cabin of a stout little ship, with lamps lighted and books to read, and pemmican in abundance (the very name of pemmican made the mouth water, though I had but a glimmer of its composition), while she, gripped in ice, resisted pressure like a Saucy Castle under unavailing siege.

"Well, you might try it," he said.

I stared incredulously into his unmoving face till he added, "Suppose you go into the coal-hole, and spend a few hours there. That may give you some idea of what you might expect."

He, too, must have been a humourist, but I took him quite seriously, and after a moment's indecision immured myself, more from an impulse of curiosity than obedience, in that part of the cellar which spread in utter darkness under the sidewalk. Cathay beckoned me from the farther end. Baffin's Bay lay behind me near the closed door. I was in my winter quarters and confident of reaching Behring's Sea in the Spring. The darkness was relieved and made splendid by the flashes of the aurora in quivering rays of violet, orange, sapphire, crimson and colours for which I could not find a name. Sport was almost as good as that of Mr. Roosevelt in Africa long afterward. I killed four polar bears, about a dozen sea-lions, And three musk-oxen. I elaborated my plans, and finding open water unexpectedly, struck north and planted the Confederate flag on the Pole, which to my surprise was only a moving mass of ice and snow.

Probably I spent the whole afternoon in that dismal cellar. It was damp as well as cold, and had a smell of stagnant water. My teeth were chattering, my feet and fingers numb at the end of my sojourn, and I put off further explorations, not abandoning them but postponing them till a later date, when they were to be renewed in an unforeseen way.

Another adventure urged its attractions. From a seat in the bay window I saw Captain Bebbington jauntily mounted on his glossy bay hunter going home to the fine house he had rented on the hill, which then looked down over meadows to the mouth of the river, with yellow sandhills on both sides, and the silverygray Welsh mountains flickering in the haze beyond. My mother shrugged her shoulders and made what I called "a face." He had been one of my father's juniors in the Cunard service, but he had retired from that, and suddenly become a person of splendour.

"No better than a pirate," my mother said, but on some matters I had my own opinions and prudently reserved them.

A new kind of craft had appeared in the docks lately: small, rakish, slick and slippery steamers of light draught and graceful lines, which bore such names as Lynx, Badger, Fox, Ferret and Greyhound, indicative of both cunning and velocity. They were so slender, so unequal to the Atlantic, that some of them foundered in the first gale they encountered, even no farther away than the bar; and yet weather played but a small part in their destiny. Throngs gathered whenever one of them sailed. It was "Ahead, full-speed" from the moment she passed out of the docks, with her slanting funnels belching skeins of curdled brown smoke, and her paddle-wheels spinning a broad, white, spuming wake. Men picked for daring manned her and they left vacancies in the older services to less reckless successors. We stood on the quay watching her with wondering eyes till nothing remained of her but a saffron plume on the horizon out toward Point Lynas.

Sometimes neither the ship nor her crew ever came home. It was a precarious and exciting business. She might make Bermuda or Nassau and load an almost priceless cargo there for Galveston, Charleston or Wilmington, expecting to receive cotton or other staples of the South in return, yet after surviving the stress of the Atlantic she might fall a prey to the blockading fleet, and be either captured or sunk. If captured, those of the men who were not killed had plenty of leisure for repentance in prison.

Captain Bebbington and I were of the lucky who eluded pursuit, however. He had made eight round voyages between Nassau and Wilmington, and the newspapers, which could be depended on then, said that his profits had been fully one hundred and fifty thousand dollars each trip. That is a matter of history — it is on record of him and other blockade runners. My own profits were quite as large as his, but I do not know what became of them, except that with them I intended to dress my mother in the heaviest and most brilliant fabrics in the shop windows, especially shot silks quivering with colours like my aurora borealis.

She wore a gown that was no novelty when I heard her say to me, "Dreaming again! Eh, my lad, how I wish you had more application!"

Nearly all the boys in my school had more "application" than I had. I was a trying and desultory scholar, whose only promise lay in the exercise known as "compositions."

Then the theatre caught me. We had an uncle who was editor of the Chronicle, the oldest paper in the town, a serious, dignified gentleman, who always dressed in black like a clergyman, and who to me seemed elderly and venerable. He may have been about thirty-five. We did not see him often, but when we did it usually was at the gates of Paradise with him as St. Peter. He invited us to the play, and the deference with which he was received by the acting manager gave me my first glimpse of the POWER OF THE PRESS. Capitals are indispensable in recognizing that august and indefeasible influence. The prices were not high, the maximum — four shillings — for the boxes. The pit was a shilling and the gallery sixpence. The performance began at seven and did not end till eleven or a little later. At nine o'clock you could enter at half-price, with two hours of diversion before you, including two of the five acts of a tragedy, and the "comedietta" or farce, which always ended the entertainment. Never were there more liberal and more protracted programmes than the damp and inky broadsides of quarto size, which announced that the curtain would rise at seven with the "screaming" farce of "Box and Cox," to be followed by Shakespeare's "sublime" tragedy of "Hamlet," the whole concluding with the "roaring" farce of "No. 1, Round the Corner." Sometimes a "ballet divertisement" was interpolated in that stupendous triple bill, and Miss McGinty — that was the real name which the lady bore unashamed and without stooping to any pseudonym, or French or Italianized translation of it Miss McGinty danced, like a wave of the sea, the Pavlova of the time and locality, with a supporting corps of tinselled star-eyed sylphs, whose pink legs looked eatable and always reminded me of strawberry ice-cream.

Of course we paid nothing, and acquired self-importance from our privilege. The acting manager hovered about us, and spoke to Uncle Dignan between the acts. "Quite all right, Mr. Dignan? If you would like to change your seats, a little nearer the front, or over there by the proscenium, I shall be most happy." He was a resplendent person, with a glittering gold watch chain as thick as a dog's leash, and diamonds on his fingers; as smooth and as glossy as a barber is when, cigar in mouth, he leaves his shop for a promenade. We swelled with pride under his flattering attention.

The bill was changed nearly every night, and each man in his turn played many parts. The actors were humble and simple people, the greatest of them content with ridiculously small salaries, who obeyed the traditions of their business, and never varied, unless there happened to be a daring young fellow like Henry Irving among them, the accents and the attitudes stereotyped and prescribed by earlier custom. In a single week we might have "Hamlet," "Othello" and "Macbeth," alternated by such melodramas as the "Forest of Bondy," "Rob Roy" and "The Stranger," and at Christmas, he who had been Polonius the night before tumbled about with senile humour as Pantaloon, and Ophelia frisked and be-witched us in frothy and abbreviated skirts as Columbine. None of the theatres of New York or London can compare in sumptuousness with the old playhouse, if memory of the impression it made can be trusted, and if it was dimly lighted by yellow and sputtering gas, if it smelled of the play-bills, oranges, ginger-beer and perspiration those things did not in the least impair its fascination.

It was not the leading man, Mr. Cowper, who was so popular that his annual benefit ran through a whole week, nor the sweet little leading lady, Miss Hill, who enthralled me. It was the superlative beauty of Miss Bella Goodall, the soubrette, as she stood in the lime-light, and sang " Cherry Ripe," which waved me back to Carthage. The audience liked a song anywhere in the long bill, and never questioned the appropriateness of such an interlude at any point in the play. One of the characters would say to the others, "Shall we have a song?" leaving argument and action in abeyance, and the reply could only be inferred as acquiescent, for it could not be heard through the deafening applause of the audience. Then the orchestra would tune up and Miss Goodall, smiling and bowing, would open the most beautiful mouth in the world, a mouth and teeth which justified the simile of the rose with a drift of snow in it.

It bowled me over; I dreamed of it; it led me into temptation, and I succumbed. I must have been depraved as well as precocious, for having once seen her I became a guilty and clandestine thing, paying for intervals of heaven with long-drawn hours of fear and shame. After going to bed I dressed again, and stole out on tip-toes to the six-penny gallery to see Miss Goodall night after night. I would sneak to the stage door after the performance and watch for her and follow her, unobserved and at a respectful distance, till she entered her lodgings in Mount Pleasant. Even then I waited until she blew out the candle in her decent attic, and only then, glowing in the frost like one who has been to a shrine, I trudged home.

I learned to smoke, for smoking is manly, and I desired to be a man; I desired to be a man, because I wanted to declare my passion and throw myself at Miss Goodall's feet.

No other period of life is so restless and discontented as adolescence, and while the freedom of manhood is seen tantalizingly near, the shackles of bondage cramp our feet. One boy's experience is :much like another's, and ludicrous as that infatuation may have been, I dare say many serious old gentlemen can, if their memories are long enough and candid enough, recall how they too were smitten by calf-love.

Quite recently a gray-haired vicar confessed to me a youthful passion of his own. In his undergraduate days he was madly in love, and meaning to propose he called on the lady one afternoon, when she received him with particular graciousness. He trembled, and rose from his seat with a half-paralyzed movement toward her, but sat down again before he could utter a word. She, of course, divined what was coming, as women always do in such predicaments, and without revealing her intuition by face or voice or any sign, she sighed, "I had forgotten that this is my birthday. How tragic it is! I am forty years old to-day — an old, old woman!" The vicar's sense of disparity must have been more acute than mine, for he resigned himself to the repulse while I; on the contrary, could not have been silenced had Miss Goodall confessed to fifty, for to me she was an unaging goddess untouchable by Time's blight and afflictions.

The psychologists claim that they can tell a man what he is fit for if they catch him young enough, but this science was not in those days on everybody's tongue or so familiar in newspapers and periodicals as it is now. One followed one's family in vocations as in religion and in politics. We had little freedom of choice, and class and environment controlled us and disposed of us. Most of my friends went to sea, or became apprentices, with indentures binding them for five years, in the offices of the owners and brokers of ships, or in the shipyards, or in those businesses which deal in cotton, rum and palm oil, the exports and imports of all lands and climes, which scented the wharves and the towering, sooty, flat-faced warehouses along the docks. As I have said, my father was in the Cunard service, and brothers of 'his and of my mother were mariners. We revered the memory of a great-great-uncle, Sir Edward Walpole Browne, who had been an admiral in the Royal Navy, and a friend of the great Sir Robert Walpole.

Perhaps no other town of its size in the world had less in it to foster academic or literary tastes than that bustling, wind-driven, rain-swept old seaport.

The most eminent person in literature who ever dwelt there was an American, Hawthorne, who, serving as consul growled at it and gibed at it in his forlorn detachment, finding no consolation for its commercialism and materialism in the vigour of its people, the rush of its tides and the pageantry of its shipping. It was Hades to him, despite its river and its rain.

Another American discovered a glamour in it because it gave him his first glimpse of England and because "the elegant historian of the Medici," Roscoe — the adjective is Washington Irving's was one of its townsmen. What can we do but smile now when Roscoe is so faded a figure, so seldom heard of, so little read — what can we do but smile condescendingly at the child-like delight of that gentle pilgrim, who wrote in his "Sketch Book:" "I drew back with an involuntary feeling of veneration. This, then, was an author of celebrity; this was one of those men whose voices have gone forth to the ends of the earth, with whose minds I have communed even in the solitudes of America. Accustomed as we are in our country to know European writers only by their works, we cannot conceive of them, as of other men, engrossed by trivial or sordid pursuits, and jostling with the crowd of common minds in the dusty paths of life. They pass before our imaginations like superior beings, radiant with the emanations of their genius, and surrounded by a halo of literary glory."

We did not see that halo on Roscoe's head, nor did he inspire as much reverence among us as did the merchant princes who lived in solemn state in mansions of the red sandstone which underlies nearly all that neighbour-hood. It was the insular period. The grounds of every house of consequence were enclosed by walls almost as massive as those of the forts at the mouth of the river, which also were of red sandstone. when little houses were girt and hidden by walls higher than their roofs. They had nothing to fear, and the inmates were prodigiously hospitable. Their monastic detachment was but a visible translation of the old dictum, "An Englishman's house is his castle." The owners of the ships and sugar plantations, the cotton kings, the ship builders, they in their magnificence compelled homage, and mothers and fathers held them up to their sons for emulation, as wisely as Miss Mitford held up a business man to James Payn when he beat embryo wings in a fluttering longing for a literary career. We looked on authors as sorts of lusus naturae, queer, unaccountable, erratic people, from whom ordinary behaviour could not be expected. A small poetess visited us once, and put the house in constraint, partly in awe, partly in covert derision. ' I showed her one of my "compositions," and she stroked me and sonorously said (a compliment hardly understood) : "Who knows? Perhaps a Macaulay in embryo, a Chalmers in bud." Beyond that I can only remember that she was extremely plain "about the head," as a candid friend of mine put it not 'very politely, and that I invidiously compared her with Miss Goodall and Miss McGinty.

Authors were few and far between there. One of them was H. J Byron, who afterward gave us "Our Boys" and a chain of other flimsy and facile' comedies, some of them very amusing in dialogue and characterization but tenuous and traditional in plot. He was not a native, but with speculative audacity had come down from Landon to take on his shoulders the management of the three principal theatres. I can remember him in his fashion-able London clothes, drawling in speech, slow and lugubrious in manner, immitigably cynical and habitually bored. People repeated the clever things he said, as, for instance, his reply to the friend who met him and inquired, "What's the matter, old fellow? You look out of sorts. Liver?"

"No, my boy, not liver. Liverpool."

Aliens seem never to appreciate those charms of the old seaport which for us the clamorous winds cannot disperse and the driving rains cannot wash away.

Mrs. Oliphant belonged to us, but had gone away. W. S. Gilbert paid us an occasional visit when, long be-fore his operetta and magisterial period, he produced one-hour burlesques with Charles Wyndham, a mere boy, in the cast. Then Uncle Dignan had a friend who, while plodding on the newspapers, was reaching out toward literature a most agreeable young man, with the kindest eyes, a mellifluous brogue, and velvety manners, Justin McCarthy. But we regarded none of them seriously; never for a moment did we exalt them as Irving exalted his "elegant historian." A certain novelist offered himself as a candidate for Parliament, and it seemed presumptuous and audacious on his part. A grocer or a butcher would have struck us as hardly less suitable for the honours of Westminster than a mere literary person. Captain Bebbington, of the Blockade Runners, continued to be a more popular hero than any of them.

A change was impending in my tastes and desires, however. If once the lure of the sea entangles one it is impossible to entirely free one's self from its meshes; it endures till death. One may escape the complete surrender to it that makes a lifelong sailor. Still its entreaty persists, and we buy a yacht, or join the naval reserve, or at least haunt the wharves in our spare time and surprise our friends by our knowledge of the history of ocean steamers. I did not renounce it, and it pleads with me to this day; but another lure began in another way to compete with it and to keep me in a silent corner at home, when my habit had been to dream my leisure away along the docks or on the landing stage. The sea was heard now in a minor key, not threatening compulsion while it pleaded, but coming to the ear like sleeping water under the summer sun. I do not know to a certainty just how or when the new ambition found its cranny and sprouted, and I wonder that it did not perish at once, like others of its kind which never blossoming were torn from the bed that nourished them and borne afar like balls of thistle down. How and why it survived the rest, which seemed more feasible, I am not able to answer fully or satisfactorily to myself, and other people have yet to show any curiosity about it.

Perhaps its origin was in the vogue of Dickens. He obsessed us. The neighbours ceased to be called by their own names and were nicknamed after his characters. The doctor's assistant became Bob Sawyer, and the boots at the Derby Arms, Sam Weller. The nurse in our own family was never spoken of except as Tilly Slowboy, and who could the ancient mariner in the little shop, where you could buy blocks, tackle, and every part in exact and exquisite miniature of hull and rigging for the model ships we built who could he be but Cap'n Cuttle?

Lady Dedlock, Oliver Twist, Joshua Bounderby, Mr. Gradgrind, Mr. Pecksniff, Mr. Bumble, Chadband, Quilp's boy, Mr. Snodgrass, Mark Tapley, Caleb Plummer, and Mr. Pickwick himself — they all passed our door or were met day after day, and some of them were intimates. Mr. Micawber was protean and multiple, a solicitor, a cotton broker, a house agent, a wine merchant, a derelict, whose occupation changed often, an inconstant bird of passage caught in a tunnel with sun-shine at both ends of it and dispiriting dulness in the middle. He used to pat my head, and call me his "little man " in a loose, moist voice which always smelled of gin.

The humour and the pathos of Dickens liberalized us, loosened our purse strings, conciliated our antipathies, and, like a dew from heaven, fertilized the kindness of our hearts. For a time I took what he gave us only for the pleasure of it, the humour at a higher value than the pathos, but by and by he emerged out of the quality of one who merely entertained into prophetic and messianic proportions. It came over me as a divine revelation of one who was taking on his shoulders the burden of the world, and whose purpose, aflame in his passion for humanity, was to lash all false dealing and hypocrisy, and to lend a hand to all who were heavy laden and sorrowful.

Through this influence, fortified by the reading of bits of Carlyle ("Heroes and Hero Worship" and "Past and Present"), Kingsley's "Alton Locke" and Charles Reade, not to speak of the other printed food, digestible and indigestible, in masses and morsels, the literary profession made a louder call than the deep, and the once belittled author became an object of idolatry even more exalted and more benevolent than Roscoe was to Irving. To all authors of sentiment I attributed in my fervour boundless goodness of heart and a benign compassion for all who were oppressed and in distress. Was imagination again playing tricks with me? As I had followed Miss Goodall from the stage door, so I now followed, whenever I met him, one I knew only by sight and reputation, whose sketches in a local paper had a Dickens flavour. I framed him in the halo of a saint, never thinking that, like Gilbert's poet, he may have been "heavy, beery, and bilious."

Nearly all light literature had a Dickens flavour as long as Dickens was in his ascendency. Never had any other writer so many imitators, nor a flavour so easily counterfeited. The flavour clung to those who caught it as tenaciously as the odours of tobacco, musk, pepper-mint, valerian, cling to all who touch them or come near them. Nothing was immune from its infection; it over-powered me. Tiny Tim, Little Nell, and the rest were unintentionally parodied; many of my scenes were laid in snow, and my characters, with grotesque names, were inordinately hungry and very fond of hot punch; that is, the best of them were. The baser ones, like Scrooge, were of frugal appetite, dyspeptic, and solitary, and for them the flowing bowl had no sort of attraction.

How at this period I watched for the postman ! Envelopes of portentous bulk were put into my hands so often that I became 'inured to disappointment, unsurprised, and unhurt, like a patient father who has more faith in the abilities of his children than the stupid and purblind world which will not employ them.

These rejected essays and tales were my children, and the embarrassing number of them did not curb my philoprogenitiveness.

Dawn broke unheeded and without reproach to the novice as he sat by candle-light at his table giving shape and utterance to dreams which did not foretell penalties, nor allow any intimation to reach him of the disillusionings sure to come, sharp-edged and poignant, with the awakening day. The rocky coast of realities, with its shoals and whirlpools, which encircles the sphere of dreams, is never visible till the sun is high. You are not awake till you strike it.

Up and dressed, careless of breakfast, he hears the postman's knock. Nobody outside the family, except the postman himself, is allowed to give that sharp "tat-tat — tat-tat — tat-tat — tat-tat!" on the brass Medusa's face which receives the imperious and exigent blows from the pendant springing from her coils. Lesser people dare no more than a single, muffled, deprecatory, and apprehensive rap, which the Kitchen answers tardily, reluctantly, and perhaps superciliously.

There is Something for the boy, which at a glance instantly dispels the clouds of his drowsiness and makes his heart jump: an envelope not bulky, an envelope whose contents tremble in his hand and grow dim in his eyes, and have to be read and read again before they can be believed. One of his stories has at last found a place and will be printed next month! Life may bestow on us its highest honours, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, the guerdon of a glorious lot, but it can never transcend or repeat the thrill and ecstacy of the triumphant apotheosis of such a moment as that.

It was a fairy story, and though nobody could have suspected it, the fairy queen was Miss Goodall, much diminished in stature, of course, with all her indubitable excellencies, her nobility of character, and her beauty of person sublimated to an essence that only a Liliputian vessel could hold. Her instincts were domestic, and her domain was the hearthstone, and there she and her attendants, miniatures of the charming damsels in Miss McGinty's peachy and strawberry-legged corps de ballet, rewarded virtue and trampled meanness under their dainty, twinkling feet. Moreover, the story was to be paid for, a condition of the greater glory, an irrefragable proof of merit. Only as evidence of worth was money thought of, and though much needed, it alone was lightly regarded. The amount turned out to be very small. The editor handed it out of his trousers pocket not the golden guinea looked for, but a few shillings. He must have detected a little disappointment in the drooping corners of the boy's mouth, for without any remark from him he said — he was a dingy and inscrutable person "That is all we ever pay four shillings per colyume," pronouncing the second syllable of that word like the second syllable of "volume."

What did the amount matter to the boy? A paper moist and warm from the press was in his hands, and as he walked home through sleet and snow and wind — the weather of the old seaport was in one of its tantrums — he stopped time and again to look at his name, his very own name, shining there in letters as lustrous as the stars of heaven Soap bubbles and bits of coloured glass in a two-penny kaleidoscope! Forty years and more have slipped away. The bubbles are burst, and the kaleidoscope long ago passed to the dust heap. The cobbler is still at his last, weary but not yet spent. Sometimes he has tried his hand at Cinderella slippers, but they have been too clumsy for wear, and he has surrendered fine jobs of that kind to those who have a lighter touch than his own.

So many of us who call ourselves authors are like him, doing plain and honest work for ordinary use without ever approaching perfection. The cobbler may have the better of the comparison, for the world must have his shoes, while it can get along very well, losing little of wisdom and little of diversion, without the evanescent things it takes from us in urbane toleration, only because they are fresh from the shop, of the day's date, or baited with the bare possibilities, which so seldom materialize, of the new Aldrich, the new Stevenson, the new Hardy, the new Gissing, or the new Mark Twain, who is hoped for. Cobblers are never so numerous that each cannot earn a decent living and smoke his pipe contentedly, but there is not room for all the authors, and they are driven ashore like shoals of herring and mackerel by the pressure of the multitude of others behind them and around them. They must compete with the great dead and the living amateurs, without the jealous protection of any labour union; yet it must be confessed that the heaviest millstone around the neck of some of us, if not most of us, is the handicap nature has weighed us with in our own mediocrity. We see others climb to alpine heights, and are not jealous of them, nor do they from their eminence throw us over, or cease to be kind.

The compensation of the craft is in its fellowship and -camaraderie. We understand and sympathize with one another whatever the disparity between us may be. For myself I would stick to the business because it brings even to the cobbler in it so many delightful friends. I remember a little dinner at which all those present were authors, distinguished and undistinguished.

"Haven't we had a good time?" cried Edmund Clarence Stedman, glowing at the end of it. "After all we are never so happy as we are when we are among ourselves."