* * * * *

In Sydney and “on the rocks,” that is with nothing to eat and no place to sleep but outdoors.

Of course I couldn’t keep away from the ships.  I arrived at the Circular Quay.  I ran into the Sailors’ Mission.  They were serving tea and having a prayer-meeting.  I wandered in.

A thin, wisplike man, timid, in black, but very gentlemanly, made me heartily welcome.  Not with that obnoxious, forced heartiness sky-pilots think the proper manner to affect in dealing with sailors, but in a human way genuinely felt.

After a service of hearty singing, he asked me if he could help me in any way.

“I suppose you can.  I’m on the rocks bad.”

He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea.  And a couple of shillings beside.

“I wonder if there’s anything else I can do?”

“Yes, I’m a poet,” I ventured, “and I’d like to get Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to read again.”  I said this as much to startle the man as really meaning it.  I can go so long without reading certain poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food.  I was hungry for Chaucer.

Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission.  What is more, he lent me Skeats’ edition of Chaucer, complete.  And all the time I was with him he proved a “good sport.”  He didn’t take advantage of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about God.

He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed religion with him.

* * * * *

It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living.  And I had fed myself full on Chaucer.

I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in a sailors’ mission.  And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she must convert.

* * * * *

“How’d you like a voyage to China?” the sky-pilot asked, one day.

Cathay ...  Marco Polo ...  Milton’s description of the Chinese moving their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic visions marched across my mind at the question.

“I’d like to, right enough.”

“Then here’s a chance for you,” and he handed me a copy of the Bulletin, pointing out an advertisement for cattlemen on the steamboat, South Sea King, about to take a cargo of steers from Queensland to Taku, province of Pechi-li, Northern China.

“What are they sending cattle away up there for?”

“Supplies for troops ...  The Boxer outbreak, you know ... go down to the number given in the advertisement, and I’m sure they’ll sign you on as cattleman, if you want the job.”