This experience sank so deep, and, together with the life in earlier years, had so marked an effect on Stanley’s character, that it seemed best to give it to the reader just as he noted it down as he mused over his life, near its close. When fame and prosperity came to him, he was just to the claims of blood, and gave practical help; but the tenderness which lay deep in his nature, and the repeated and hopeless rebuffs it encountered, produced, in the reaction, an habitual, strong self-suppression. The tenderness was there, through all the stirring years of action and achievement; but it was guarded against such shocks as had earlier wounded it, by an habitual reserve, and an austere self-command. He returned to America, and, with a sort of rebound towards the world of vigorous action, threw himself, for a time, into the life of the sea. The motive, apparently, was partly as a ready means of livelihood, and partly a relish for adventure; and adventure he certainly found. Through 1863, and the early months of 1864, he was in one ship and another, in the merchant service; sailing to the West Indies, Spain, and Italy. He condenses a ship-wreck into a two-line entry: ‘Wrecked off Barcelona. Crew lost, in the night. Stripped naked, and swam to shore. Barrack of Carbineers ... demanded my papers!’ The end of 1863 finds him in Brooklyn, New York, where we have another brief chronicle:-- * * * * * Boarding with Judge X----. Judge drunk; tried to kill his wife with hatchet; attempted three times.--I held him down all night. Next morning, exhausted; lighted cigar in parlour; wife came down--insulted and raved at me for smoking in her house! * * * * * In August, 1864, he enlisted in the United States Navy, on the receiving ship ‘North Carolina,’ and was then assigned to the ‘Minnesota,’ and afterwards to the ‘Moses H. Stuyvesant,’ where he served in the capacity of ship’s writer. Nothing shows that he was impelled by any special motive of sympathy with the national cause. It has been told how he went into the Confederate service, as a boy naturally goes, carried along with the crowd. At this later time he may have caught something of the enthusiasm for the Union that filled the community about him; or, very probably, he may have gone on a fighting ship simply as more exciting to his adventurous spirit than a peaceful merchantman. In any case, he embarked on what proved to be the beginning of his true occupation and career, as the observer and reporter of stirring events; later, he was to play his part as a maker of events.