My colleague the Second, he intends to work ashore and sleep at home. The clergyman's daughter, I imagine, will come more and more into the scheme of things, and the mother he loves so well will give him her blessing. So each, you see, has a clearly defined plan, while I drift along, planless, ambitionless, smoking many pipes. I have been trying to think out something practicable. Am I to drift always about the world, a mere piece of flotsam on Swansea tide? Or am I to sit down once more in Chelsea, hand and brain running to seed, while the world spins on outside? I must think out a plan. And I must school myself to cancel all plans beginning "If she will--if only." Why cannot I rise to some decent sense of self-respect, to say, as says the man in "The Last Ride Together": "_Take back the hope you gave,--I claim Only a memory of the same._" That's manly--pre-eminently English, in fact. But, meanwhile, I drift planless. The mighty Norseman, too, in his own sinewy Hyperborean style, is full of joy. His jolly pasty face beams joyously upon me. He will be "a passenger for one quid" from London to Gothenburg, thence to Stockholm, and Marianna. The engine-room is bulging, in places, with the contraband goods he is bringing home for Marianna. Pieces of silk "for the Signorina," as the handsome old huxter-lady at Canary purrs in our ears; bottles of Florida water, mule canaries, and Herrick's own divine Canary Sack, to which he so often bade "farewell." All these for the dainty maiden who indulges in German Script. God speed you, oh, mighty Norseman! May your frescoed bosom never prove unfaithful to your grey-eyed maiden. I, at least, have been the better for having known you--a ship passing in the night. And so we come to the Mumble Head. XXVII Paid off, free for the afternoon, with overcoat buttoned up and collar about my ears, I stroll aimlessly through the town. It has often been my ambition to emulate those correct creatures who, when they come to a place, study maps, read guide-books, and "do" the sights one by one. But, so far, I am a dead failure. Even my own dear London is known to me by long-continued pedestrianism. When I reach a town I put up by chance, I see things by chance, leave on an impulse, and carry away precious glimpses of nothing in particular that I can piece together at leisure into a sort of mnemonic mosaic. Well, so I stroll through Swansea, trying to forget the only two facts which I know concerning it--that Beau Nash was born here and Savage died here. They are like bits of grit in the oyster of my content. I will turn aside and see life.