All that he heard in church and Sunday-school was readily relegated by him to the category of things that ought to be done, even if you couldn’t see the use of them; but as to trying to understand them, well, that was the merest nonsense. Not that he ever put these thoughts and feelings into words, but they were none the less real to him. Then, suddenly, without any previous preparation discernible by him, a foreign element came into his life. Coming home from the village school one afternoon (he was then thirteen years old), he met a bronzed, weather-beaten man who inquired of him the way to a neighboring town; and as that way for some little distance happened to be his own, they walked together. Within ten minutes the boy had imbibed from the wayfarer an intense desire to go a-roving. For the weather-beaten stranger was a sailor returning home after an absence of many years; and the plain recital of his adventures, without any attempt to enhance their interest, fired the country boy’s blood to such an extent that his breath came in short gasps, and he gazed at the seamed and sunburnt face beside him as if he could see in it some reflection of the wondrous scenes through which it had passed apparently unheeding. They parted; but the boy, his brain all in a ferment with wonder and desire, returned to his home as one that treads the clouds. And that night he waylaid his father, saying stammeringly: “Dad, I want to go to sea.” Now the father, although a home-keeping man, had long faced the probability of losing his nestlings as soon as they felt their wings growing, the more since he knew well that opportunities for their attaining any position worth considering in the small town of their birth would almost certainly be wanting. Moreover, he had a severe struggle to keep them in comfort on his very small though constant earnings, and any lightening of his burden, even though in the process his heart-strings were strained, was to be welcomed. But as each child had been born to him he had commended it unreservedly to the care of his Heavenly Father, whose love to him had been the pivot of his own life ever since he was sixteen years old. And so it came about that, after a touching scene with his mother, the boy was helped to his desire, and by the most heroic efforts on the part of his father he found himself, six months after giving utterance to his wish, a member of the apprentice portion of the crew of a huge four-masted ship, bound from Liverpool to San Francisco.