by like a marching military band. But he couldn't get started.

Once beyond Sandy Hook, he would immediately know all about
engines and fighting. It would help, he was certain, to be
shanghaied. But no matter how wistfully, no matter how late at
night he timorously forced himself to loiter among unwashed
English stokers on West Street, he couldn't get himself molested
except by glib persons wishing ten cents "for a place to sleep."

When he had dallied through breakfast that particular morning he
sat about. Once he had pictured sitting about reading
travel-books as a perfect occupation. But it concealed no
exciting little surprises when he could be a Sunday loafer on any
plain Monday. Furthermore, Goaty never made his bed till noon,
and the gray-and-brown-patched coverlet seemed to trail all
about the disordered room.

Midway in a paragraph he rose, threw _One Hundred Ways to See
California_ on the tumbled bed, and ran away from Our Mr. Wrenn.
But Our Mr. Wrenn pursued him along the wharves, where the sun
glared on oily water. He had seen the wharves twelve times that
fortnight. In fact, he even cried viciously that "he had seen
too blame much of the blame wharves."

Early in the afternoon he went to a moving-picture show, but the
first sight of the white giant figures bulking against the gray
background was wearily unreal; and when the inevitable
large-eyed black-braided Indian maiden met the canonical
cow-puncher he threshed about in his seat, was irritated by the
nervous click of the machine and the hot stuffiness of the room,