and twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their
ships and apprenticeships in various ports of the world and
drifted into the forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were
healthy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed, and they were young--youths
like me, learning the way of their feet in the world of men. And
they WERE men. No mild saki for them, but square faces illicitly
refilled with corrosive fire that flamed through their veins and
burst into conflagrations in their heads. I remember a melting
song they sang, the refrain of which was:


"'Tis but a little golden ring,
I give it to thee with pride,
Wear it for your mother's sake
When you are on the tide."


They wept over it as they sang it, the graceless young scamps who
had all broken their mothers' prides, and I sang with them, and
wept with them, and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of
it, and struggled to make glimmering inebriated generalisations on
life and romance. And one last picture I have, standing out very
clear and bright in the midst of vagueness before and blackness
afterward. We--the apprentices and I--are swaying and clinging to
one another under the stars. We are singing a rollicking sea
song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and we are
marking the rhythm with waving square faces. From up and down the
street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing, and life
is great, and beautiful and romantic, and magnificently mad.