"And what little I had known was fading voyage by voyage. Only rarely was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all. Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb cathedral--_they_ were no kin of the men who built it or the men who prayed and worshipped in it either. Indeed, you can often find the cathedral empty and a sheet-iron shack round the corner near the railroad full of men and women shouting their heads off. And the rich people who lived in the castles had not much in common with the men who built them. It wasn't, mind you, that I was envying these people or even quarrelling with them. It wasn't that they were not orderly and hard-working and conscientious. They were all that. No, it was a curious impression they gave me of being only half alive. I used to watch them in church, in saloons, in theatres, and they seemed oppressed by some malign invisible fate standing over them and taking much of the sparkle out of their souls. I was oppressed, too, by the same influence. I used to wonder what it was. Only at the football matches did it seem to lift at all. I always enjoyed the football. It was there you could catch in their faces the light of battle and the lust of conflict. There their features were sharpened to the tenseness you find hardened into a type here in America, men who are alive! But most of the time each class was oppressed by the one above it. Away at the top was the great shipowning peer, the colossus of that particular part of the country, an ominous and omnipotent figure. Below him were other shipowners, smaller fry, living in fine houses where they had made their money, connected by marriage with the next below, still smaller shipowners and men who had built up successful repair-shops and ship-stores. Next came the retired ship-masters, living in villas named after their last commands, and skippers still at sea, their wives watching each other like cats at church on Sunday. Then, in tiny semi-detached brick boxes up narrow streets behind all these you would find mates and engineers packed like sardines. Their families, I mean. I often used to think of the abstract folly of these men calling such places 'home' when they sometimes were away years on end. Our chief mate took pity on me one week-end and invited me over to his house at Hartlepool. I forget which Hartlepool it was, it doesn't matter now. I remember, however, that we had to make several connections on branch lines to get there, and it was a