To my great sorrow this good time came to an end with the finishing of the houses, and I was again adrift. And now let me say in deepest gratitude, that through cold, hunger, wet, and sleeping out, I do not remember ever ailing anything. True, I was stunted in my growth owing to privation, but I was wiry, and except for the curse of bad teeth, I do not think I ever had an ache or pain except the transient ones of cold and hunger. But my great sorrow, continually haunting me, was the fact that I never was able to get permanent employment. No sooner did I seem to get settled and satisfied, than some catastrophe or other would come along and heave me out into unattached desolation again. I was like a homeless dog, ready to fawn upon any possible proprietor, and gladly give up my hated freedom for the certainty of continuous employment. Now I had heard many things about life at sea, for an uncle of mine, whom I had not seen for years, had commanded ships for a long time, and his remarks upon the sailor's life I had often drank in with greedy care. Nothing that he ever said gave me the slightest desire to adopt his career, for from my earliest recollection I had an analytical mind, and I really had no desire to seek adventure at the cost of all that most people consider makes life worth living. I am afraid my bent was essentially bourgeois, strengthened and set as time wore on and experience came to me. I felt that I could understand, dimly perhaps but certainly, how boys who had never known a hardship, a want unsupplied, should be led away by the glamour of what they read, but how ever a boy who knew what the stress and struggle of life meant ashore could go to sea knowingly, to encounter conditions far worse, I did not understand. And now, for me at least, the explanation came. It was continuity of employment. You might not like your job, or your employer might be entirely dissatisfied with you, but you were compelled to put up with each other until the passage was over, at anyrate. This made the prospect of sea-life tolerable to me. I was under absolutely no apprehensions as to romantic adventure, for I was certainly not the stuff of which adventurers are made. All my adventures had been forced upon me, and I was never so happy as when I was under somebody's command, if that somebody would only give me an encouraging word now and then.