"You can't swim in that ice water," said the harpooner
confidentially to me. "You double up in a minute and go down.
When a whale smashes your boat, the thing to do is to get your
belly across an oar, so that when the cold doubles you you'll
float."

"Sure," I said, with a grateful nod and an air of certitude that
I, too, would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic
Ocean. And, truly, I registered his advice as singularly valuable
information, and filed it away in my brain, where it persists to
this day.

But I couldn't talk--at first. Heavens! I was only fourteen, and
had never been on the ocean in my life. I could only listen to
the two sea-dogs, and show my manhood by drinking with them,
fairly and squarely, drink and drink.

The liquor worked its will with me; the talk of Scotty and the
harpooner poured through the pent space of the Idler's cabin and
through my brain like great gusts of wide, free wind; and in
imagination I lived my years to come and rocked over the wild,
mad, glorious world on multitudinous adventures.

We unbent. Our inhibitions and taciturnities vanished. We were
as if we had known each other for years and years, and we pledged
ourselves to years of future voyagings together. The harpooner
told of misadventures and secret shames. Scotty wept over his
poor old mother in Edinburgh--a lady, he insisted, gently born--
who was in reduced circumstances, who had pinched herself to pay
the lump sum to the ship-owners for his apprenticeship, whose