Then the Captain had a box of books, the marvel of which cannot begin
to be described. Andrew's books were but five or six, chosen for great
quantity and small bulk; tightly and toughly bound little books of
which the Bible was first. This was his book of fairies, his Aesop; his
book of wanderings and story, of character and mystery; his
revelations, the source of his ideality, the great expander of
limitations; his book of love and adventure and war; the book
unjudgable and the bed-rock of all literary judgment. He knew the Bible
as only one can who has played with it as a child; as only one can who
has found it alone available, when an insatiable love of print has
swept across the young mind. Nothing could change him now; this was his
book of Fate.

Except for those vision-times in the big city, Andrew could not
remember when he had not read the Bible, nor did he remember learning
to read. He seemed to have forgotten how to read before he came to sea
at seven, but when an old sailor pointed out on the stern of the
jolly-boat, the letters that formed the name of his first ship--it had
all come back to the child; and then he found his first Bible. Slowly
conceiving its immensity, its fullness _for him_--he was almost lifted
from his body with the upward winging of happiness. It was his first
great exaltation, and there was a sacredness about it which kept him
from telling anybody.... And now all the structures of the great
Scripture were tenoned in his brain; so that he knew the frame of every
part, but the inner meanings of more and more marvellous dimension
seemed inexhaustible. Always excepting the great Messianic Figure--the
white tower of his consciousness--he loved Saint Paul and the
Forerunner best among the men....

There was also a big book in the Captain's chest--_Life and Death on