Notes on Life and Letters

I felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could remember such material things as the right turn to take and the general direction of the

teachers had been the sailors of the Norfolk shore; coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of very few words, which

been for some time the schoolroom of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild and stormy abode, sometimes,

Peace with Honour,” I had walked as lone as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender myself to its care

Parliament. A law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.

had written to him from Lowestoft. I can’t remember a single word of that letter now. It was my very first composition in the English language

vast and unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have been more lonely

nineteen years of age, after a period of probation and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft—my first long railway journey in England—to “sign on” for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness

break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated existence. It was like the experience of another world. The wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my youth

Since leaving the sea, to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made