Sea." Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and also my first
introduction to the sea in literature.

If I do not remember where, how, and when I learned to read, I am not
likely to forget the process of being trained in the art of reading
aloud. My poor father, an admirable reader himself, was the most
exacting of masters. I reflect proudly that I must have read that page
of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" tolerably well at the age of eight. The
next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume edition of the dramatic
works of William Shakespeare, read in Falmouth, at odd moments of the
day, to the noisy accompaniment of calkers' mallets driving oakum
into the deck-seams of a ship in dry-dock. We had run in, in a sinking
condition and with the crew refusing duty after a month of weary
battling with the gales of the North Atlantic. Books are an integral
part of one's life, and my Shakespearian associations are with that
first year of our bereavement, the last I spent with my father in exile
(he sent me away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he could
brace himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard gales,
the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water and
then by fire.

Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my
writing life began I have forgotten. I have only a vague notion that it
might have been one of Trollope's political novels. And I remember,
too, the character of the day. It was an autumn day with an opaline
atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day, with fiery points and
flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the
trees of the square, with all their leaves gone, were like the tracings
of India ink on a sheet of tissue-paper. It was one of those London days
that have the charm of mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.