birds in jungle camps, and listened to their codes of conduct and
measurements of life, he was not affected. He was a traveler, and they
were alien breeds. Secure in the knowledge of his twenty millions,
there was neither need nor temptation for him to steal or rob. All
things and all places interested him, but he never found a place nor a
situation that could hold him. He wanted to see, to see more and more,
and to go on seeing.

At the end of three years, nearly sixteen, hard of body, weighing a
hundred and thirty pounds, he judged it time to go home and open the
books. So he took his first long voyage, signing on as boy on a
windjammer bound around the Horn from the Delaware Breakwater to San
Francisco. It was a hard voyage, of one hundred and eighty days, but
at the end he weighed ten pounds the more for having made it.

Mrs. Summerstone screamed when he walked in on her, and Ah Sing had to
be called from the kitchen to identify him. Mrs. Summerstone screamed
a second time. It was when she shook hands with him and lacerated her
tender skin in the fisty grip of his rope-calloused palms.

He was shy, almost embarrassed, as he greeted his guardians at the
hastily summoned meeting. But this did not prevent him from talking
straight to the point.

"It's this way," he said. "I am not a fool. I know what I want, and I
want what I want. I am alone in the world, outside of good friends
like you, of course, and I have my own ideas of the world and what I
want to do in it. I didn't come home because of a sense of duty to
anybody here. I came home because it was time, because of my sense of
duty to myself. I'm all the better from my three years of wandering