The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Shelley. In English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising the world. I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced, modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged behind her glasses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great books as I did. Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_.... Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's _Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests, little towns on river-bends. A tramp or sailor--which? First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and back again? Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett and Fielding? It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch. Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New York waterfront that same afternoon.... I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home again. I wished him good luck and good-bye. Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Caesar and Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Shelley. * * * * * South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts dizzy things to look up at.