“Are you of German descent?”

“No, sir.”

“What nationality are you, then?”

“American, sir.”

“That means nothing, what were your people?”

“Straight English on my mother’s side ...  Pennsylvania Dutch on my father’s.”

“What a mixture!”

He began walking up and down in seaman fashion.  After spending several minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.

“Do you think you could use me, sir?”

He swung on me abruptly.

“In what capacity?”

“As anything ...  I’m willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if necessary.”

He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.

“Able seaman! you’re so thin you have to stand twice in one place to make a shadow ... you’ve got the romantic boy’s idea of the sea ... but, are you willing to do hard work from four o’clock in the morning till nine or ten at night?”

“Anything, to get to sea, sir!”

“—­sure you haven’t run away from home?”

“No-no, sir!”

“Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn’t the land good enough?”

I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of sea-life, travel, and adventure.

“You talk just like one of our German poets.”

“I am a poet,” I ventured further.

The captain gave an amused whistle.  But I could see that he liked me.

“To-morrow morning at four o’clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the cabin boy, will start you in at his job.  I’ll promote him to boy before the mast.”

* * * * *

I spent the night at Uncle Jim’s house ... he was the uncle that had come east, years before.  He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived in a flat in the Bronx.

He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he came home from work, that evening....

I could keep my adventure to myself no longer.  I told him all about my going to sea.  But did Duncan (my father) approve of it?  Yes, I replied.  But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim tried to bully me into telling.  I didn’t want my father to learn where I was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim’s....

Then he began laughing at me.

“You’ve always been known for your big imagination and the things you make up ...  I suppose this is one of them.”

“Let the boy alone,” my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and English ancestry, “you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day.”

* * * * *

“Imagination’s all right.  I’m not quarrelling with Johnnie for that.  But you can’t be all balloon and no ballast.”

They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ...  Aunt Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she had run a dressmaking establishment.