cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-country
ships? of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks and blows
were bed and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear and
hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences? I do not care to
remember. A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of
it. But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned and
killed when a man's strength came to me, only the lines of my life
were cast at the time in other places. I did return, not long ago,
but unfortunately the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in
the old days, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him a
cripple who would never walk again."

"But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside
of a school, how did you learn to read and write?" I queried.

"In the English merchant service. Cabin-boy at twelve, ship's boy
at fourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen,
and cock of the fo'c'sle, infinite ambition and infinite
loneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for
myself--navigation, mathematics, science, literature, and what not.
And of what use has it been? Master and owner of a ship at the top
of my life, as you say, when I am beginning to diminish and die.
Paltry, isn't it? And when the sun was up I was scorched, and
because I had no root I withered away."

"But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple," I chided.

"And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who
rose to the purple," he answered grimly. "No man makes
opportunity. All the great men ever did was to know it when it