of typhoid fever.

I was twenty-four, six feet tall, and forty inches around the chest.
Also, I had lived clean, and worked and played hard. I got over the
fever finally, pretty much all bone and appetite; but--alive.
Thanks to the college, my hospital care had cost nothing. It was a
good thing: I had just seven dollars in the world.

The yacht Ella lay in the river not far from my hospital windows.
She was not a yacht when I first saw her, nor at any time,
technically, unless I use the word in the broad sense of a
pleasure-boat. She was a two-master, and, when I saw her first,
as dirty and disreputable as are most coasting-vessels. Her
rejuvenation was the history of my convalescence. On the day she
stood forth in her first coat of white paint, I exchanged my
dressing-gown for clothing that, however loosely it hung, was still
clothing. Her new sails marked my promotion to beefsteak, her brass
rails and awnings my first independent excursion up and down the
corridor outside my door, and, incidentally, my return to a collar
and tie.

The river shipping appealed to me, to my imagination, clean washed
by my illness and ready as a child's for new impressions: liners
gliding down to the bay and the open sea; shrewish, scolding tugs;
dirty but picturesque tramps. My enthusiasm amused the nurses,
whose ideas of adventure consisted of little jaunts of exploration
into the abdominal cavity, and whose aseptic minds revolted at the
sight of dirty sails.

One day I pointed out to one of them an old schooner, red and