Examination day came, with all the professors in full dress. My handwriting was still clumsy. With my hard, big hands I used the bulkiest penholder I could find. It was as thick as a cane, an instrument designed for victims of apoplectic stroke who would have to grasp it with both hands. Early one morning, a good citizen of Lübeck went out to water his garden and saw a navigation student lying among his tomatoes. "What are you doing there?" The wretch, not knowing what to answer, merely asked in turn: "What are you watering?" For two days I had been celebrating the fact that I had passed the examination. Again I was tempted to rush straightway to my parents. Professor Schultze had investigated quietly on his own account and found that my father and mother were alive and well and that my brother, like myself, had turned his mind to the sea. He was an ensign in the navy. Once more I denied myself, and remembered my vow not to go home save as a naval officer. I got a post as petty officer aboard the Hamburg-South American liner _Petropolis_. I bought white kid gloves and white shoes, and can still see myself buying my first pair of cuff links. As I promenaded the deck of the _Petropolis_ in my new uniform, I felt myself a god, only my cuffs kept bothering me and saluting seemed queer. I read all the learned books I could find, but there was much I could not understand. After three quarters of a year aboard the _Petropolis_, I was eligible to enter the navy as a one-year service volunteer, for naval training and study. That was a method of training mercantile marine officers for naval service in case of war, of creating a class of reserve officers. After I had served my year as a volunteer and had mastered my studies, I would be entitled to wear a lieutenant's uniform. I would walk out a naval officer in the Imperial Service. A comrade and I took the railroad from Hamburg to Kiel to be mustered in for volunteer service. It was the first time I had ever been in an expensive railroad compartment. Opposite us sat a gentleman with a pointed beard whom we took to be a naval officer. That made us behave in very dignified fashion. "Luckner," said my comrade, "is it not a fine view?" "It is, indeed," I replied. The gentleman with the pointed beard looked at me several times. The daily drill at slow step on the parade ground at Kiel gave me a great deal of pain in the places where my legs had been broken before. An orderly came looking for a volunteer private named Luckner. I was required to go to the station. My officer asked me whether I had a relative at the station. I said, "No," and wondered whether it was a police station. Which one of my sins had been discovered?