I passed my days at length in wandering rather silently about the docks and shipping offices, seeking to invest my slender means in some venture or adventure of the sea that would take me into many ports and perhaps yield me a modest income besides. I consulted a clairvoyant among other things, a greasy person on Twenty-third Street, who took me into a dim, dingy room and told me that I was contemplating something-or-other and that somebody-or-other would have something-or-other to do with it. This was good as far as it went. I was, in fact, contemplating most of the time. I was ready for anything—to explore, to filibuster, to seek for hidden treasure—to go anywhere and to do anything that would make me fairly and legitimately a part and parcel with the sea. I read one morning of a daring voyager who in a small boat had set out to sail around the world alone. I would have given all that I possessed to have gone with him, and for a few moments I think I even contemplated a similar undertaking. But as I did not then know a gaff from a flying-jib, and realizing that my voyage would probably be completed with suddenness and violence somewhere in the neighborhood of Sandy Hook, I resisted the impulse. As for my Antarctic dream, its realization seemed even farther away than when as a boy I had first conceived it, some fifteen years before. V. I OVERHAUL THE STEAM YACHT, BILLOWCREST. It was early spring when I had arrived in New York, and the summer heat had begun to wane when I first set eyes on the Billowcrest, and its owner, Chauncey Gale. On one of those cool mornings that usually come during the first days of August I was taking a stroll up Riverside Drive. Below me lay the blue Hudson, and at a little dock just beyond Grant’s Tomb a vessel was anchored. Looking down on her from above it was evident, even to my unprofessional eye, that she was an unusual craft. Her hull was painted white like that of a pleasure yacht and its model appeared to have been constructed on some such lines. Also, an awning sheltered her decks, suggesting the sumptuous pleasures of the truly rich. But she was much larger than any yacht I had ever seen, and fully bark-rigged—carrying both steam and sail. She was wider, too, in proportion to her length, and her cabins seemed rather curiously disposed. A man laboring up the slope took occasion to enlighten me. He had just investigated on his own account. “Great boat, that,” he panted. “Cost a million, and belongs to a man named Gale. Made his money in real estate and built her himself, after his own ideas. He wasn’t a sailor at all, but he’d planned lots of houses and knew what he wanted, and had the money to pay for it. No other boat like her in the world and not apt to be; but she suits him and she goes all right, and that’s all that’s necessary, ain’t it?”