I.
ANSWER TO AN OLD SUMMONS.
For more than ten generations my maternal ancestors have been farers of the sea, and I was born within call of high tide. At the distance of a thousand miles inland it still called me, and often in childhood I woke at night from dreams of a blue harbor with white sails.
It is not strange, therefore, that I should return to the coast. When, at the age of thirty, I found myself happily rid of a commercial venture—conducted for ten years half-heartedly and with insignificant results—it was only natural that I should set my face seaward. My custom, of which there was never any great amount, and my goodwill, of which there was ever an abundance, I had disposed of to one who was likely to reverse these conditions—his methods in the matter of trade being rather less eccentric than my own. He had been able to pay me in cash the modest sum agreed upon, and this amount I now hoped to increase through some marine investment or adventure—something that would bring me at once into active sea life—though I do not now see what this could have been, and I confess that my ideas at the time were somewhat vague.