It was, perhaps, because of a real sense of the value and interest of life among simple people that Masefield made the selection he did of work to support himself during his first visit to the United States. In Connecticut he was a farm laborer, in Yonkers he was a hand in a carpet-factory and in New York City he was a sort of helper to the bartender in the old Colonial hotel on Sixth Avenue near Jefferson Market Court. This hotel is still in the possession of the family who employed Masefield and their recollections of him are highly entertaining. The writer once asked the eldest son of the family if Masefield had written anything during the days of his employment there. He had not, it seemed, and he was associated in the minds of the family with the art of poetry, for one reason only--that being that he used to sing to the fretful baby, holding it in his lap as he sat in a rocking-chair in the kitchen, waiting for his employer's wife to serve his dinner. When Masefield went back to England he went to work as a clerk in a London office. He was writing now, putting on paper the pictures that had been etched in his brain and in his heart during his wander years. Now he perceived the deep and abiding beauty and the deep and abiding tragedy (to Masefield they were the same) of his experiences. How this knowledge came to him he has told in twelve immensely sincere lines. E. A. Robinson has said that poetry is a language which tells, by means of a more or less emotional reaction, that which cannot be stated in prose. And therefore it is better to let Masefield tell this in poetry than to attempt to paraphrase it. He wrote, by way of preface to "A Mainsail Haul": "I yarned with ancient shipmen beside the galley range, And some were fond of women, but all were fond of change; They sang their quavering chanties, all in a fo'c's'le drone, And I was finally suited, if I had only known. I rested in an ale-house that had a sanded floor, Where seamen sat a-drinking and chalking up the score; They yarned of ships and mermaids, of topsail sheets and slings, But I was discontented; I looked for better things. I heard a drunken fiddler in Billy Lee's saloon, I brooked an empty belly with thinking of the tune; I swung the doors disgusted as drunkards rose to dance, And now I know the music was life and life's romance."