As for the many scraps, “chanties,” choruses, sayings, similes, and bits of sea-lore worked up into the lyrics here and there, I make no attempt whatever to indicate what is borrowed; all that I can say of it is, that if the mere gathering the stones is all the merit of making a mosaic picture (as many seem to think), then I could claim little merit for originality. But as this is not a folk-lore book, in which a writer is held sternly accountable “to give authority for every word,” and as a mass of notes would have simply defeated the whole aim of the book, I have preferred making myself amenable to the charge of plagiarism to boring my reader—even as an Italian devoted servant of whom I once heard, preferred to be carried off by the police, on the charge of stealing oranges, rather than awaken and disturb his master who could have explained the matter. I can, however, truly say that as regards ideas, incidents, tales, turns of speech and idioms, current sayings, and so on, from poetry down to vulgarity, I have literally taken so much from sailors themselves that the work, if analysed, would be a curiosity of collocation, like the poems made up entirely of proverbs, or the Sermon of Texts. Here I would mention my obligation to more than one ancient mariner, and specially to my old friend, Captain Stead, now so long a dweller at the Langham Hotel, for advising about, and revising, these ballads. These friends having carefully studied the work and corrected or modelled its every sentence into ship-shape, have been kind enough to assure me that it would hold its own in the forecastle, as a real thing, and not an imitation; which saying uttered in sooth and truth especially by a friend of forty years’ experience in sailing-vessels, mostly “before the war,” was to me greatly encouraging.