Beautiful weather; a mild southwest blow, with a moderate beam-sea;

only the deck would come up smack against the soles of his boots in a

most unexpected and aggravating manner. But after the third day out,

he found his sea-legs and learned how to "lean." From two till five

his time was his own, and a very good deal of this time he devoted to

Henley and Morris and Walt Whitman, an ancient brier between his teeth

and a canister of excellent tobacco at his elbow. Odd, isn't it, that

an Englishman without his pipe is as incomplete as a Manx cat, which,

as doubtless you know, has no tail. After all, does a Manx cat know

that it is incomplete? Let me say, then, as incomplete as a small boy

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without pockets.

Toward his fellow stewards he was friendly without being companionable;

and as they were of a decent sort, they let him go his way.

Several times during the voyage he opened his trunk and took out the

manuscripts. Hang it, they weren't so bally bad. If he could still

re-read them, after an hour or two with Henley, there must be some

merit to them.

One afternoon he sat alone on the edge of his bunk. The sun was

pouring into the porthole; intermittently it flashed over him.

Suddenly and alertly he got up, looked out, listened intently, then

stepped back into the cabin and locked the door. Again he listened.

There was no sound except the steady heart-beats of the great engines

below. He sat down sidewise, took out the chamois bag which hung

around his neck, and poured the contents out on the blanket. Blue

stones, rather dull at first; but ah! when the sun awoke the fires in

them: blue as the flower o' the corn, the flame of burning sulphur. He

gathered them up and slowly trickled them through his fingers.

Sapphires, unset, beautiful as a woman's eyes. He replaced them in the

chamois bag; and for the rest of the afternoon went about his affairs

preoccupiedly, grave as a bishop under his miter. For, all said and

done, he had much to be grave about.

In one of the panels of the partition which separated the cabin from

the next, there was a crack. A human eye could see through it very

well. And did.

My young poet had "signed on" under the name of Thomas Webb. It was

not assumed. For years he had been known in the haberdashery as Webb.

There was more to it, however; there was a tail to the kite. The

English have an inordinate fondness for hyphens, for mother's family

name and grandmother's family name and great-grandmother's, with the

immediate paternal cognomen as a period. Thomas' full name was a

rosary, if you like, of yeomen, of soldiers, of farmers, of artists, of

gentle bloods, of dreamers. The latest transfusion of blood is always

most powerful in effect upon the receiver; and as Thomas' father had

died in penury for the sake of an idea, it was in order that the son

should be something of a dreamer too. Poetry is but an expression of

life seen through dreams.




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