of his translation of Victor Hugo’s “Toilers of the Sea.”  Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and also my first introduction to the sea in literature.  If I do not remember where, how and when I learned to read, I am not likely to forget the process of being trained in the art of reading aloud.  My poor father, an admirable reader himself, was the most exacting of masters.  I reflect proudly that I must have read that page of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” tolerably well at the age of eight.  The next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in Falmouth, at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment of caulkers’ mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship in dry dock.  We had run in, in a sinking condition and with the crew refusing duty after a month of weary battling with the gales of the North Atlantic.  Books are an integral part of one’s life and my Shakespearean associations are with that first year of our bereavement, the last I spent with my father in exile (he sent me away to Poland to my mother’s brother directly he could brace himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard gales, the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water and then by fire.

Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my writing life began I have forgotten.  I have only a vague notion that it might have been one of Trollope’s political novels.  And I remember, too, the character of the day.  It was an autumn day with an opaline atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day, with fiery points and flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the trees of the square with all their leaves gone were like tracings of indian ink on a sheet of tissue paper.  It was one of those London days that have the charm of mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.  The effect of opaline mist was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on account of the nearness to the river.

There is no reason why I should remember that effect more on that day than on any other day, except that I stood for a long time looking out of the window after the landlady’s daughter was gone with her spoil of cups and saucers.  I heard her put the tray down in the passage and finally shut the door; and still I remained smoking with my back to the room.  It is very clear that I was in no haste to take the plunge into my writing life, if as plunge this first attempt may be described.  My whole being was steeped deep in the indolence of a sailor away from the sea, the scene of never-ending labour and of unceasing duty.  For utter surrender to indolence you cannot beat a sailor ashore when that mood is on him, the mood of absolute irresponsibility tasted to the full.  It seems to me that I thought of nothing whatever, but this is an impression which is hardly to be believed at this distance of years.  What I am certain of is, that I was very far from thinking of writing a story, though it is possible and even likely that I was thinking of the man Almayer.