One of these, Captain Sam Morris, was patiently stalked by the boys through a long season of yarn spinning, careful tally being kept. When the tale was complete, the boys closed in on him. "How old are you, Captain Sam?" "Oh, I dunno, I ain't kep' count." "Are you seventy?" "I swan! I dunno." "Well, you were on the Old Dove with Skipper Jimmie Stone, weren't you?" "Sartin." "You were on the Constitution, when she fought the Guerriere, weren't you?" How could he deny it? "Well, weren't you with Captain Lovett on four of his three-year trading voyages to Australia and China?" "Course I was." "How about those trips 'round the Horn, on the clipper ship 'Mary Jane' from '49 to '55?" "I was thar." They kept relentlessly on down the list, and then showed him the tally. Allowing for infancy, an abbreviated boyhood on land, and the time they had known him since he had quit the sea, he was one hundred and thirty-five years old. The showing did not disconcert him, however. He was interested, but he had told those stories so often and had come to believe each of them so implicitly that he could not doubt them in the aggregate. He simply exclaimed: "Well, I'll be darned! I feel like a young chap o' sixty." But while some of these old sailors liked to "spin yarns" and some had their frailties, they were, as a rule, strong characters, rugged, honest, courageous, unselfish--real men, in fact, whose sterling qualities stood out in strong contrast against the unreality of many timid and non-effective lives about them. It was not their romancing, but their reality, and the achieving power of their lives that appealed to me as a boy, and I was drawn to the kind of life that had helped to produce such men. Then, too, the ocean itself, with its immensity, its mystery, its moods, the danger in it, and the man's work in mastering it, was almost irresistibly attractive to me. On graduating from high school I declined my father's offer to send me to college, thinking that the life I had in view did not require a college education. Then he made me a very attractive business proposition, but it looked to me like slavery, and what I wanted most was freedom. My father and mother were both Christians, but I had become skeptical, profane and reckless of public opinion. I had left home for a boarding house in the same town at eighteen, and at nineteen I had slipped the moorings and was heading out to sea. ADRIFT