Mug of hot water in hand, I pick my way aft among the derrick chains, and descend to my room. Have I yet described it? Nine feet six by seven wide by seven high At the for’ard end a bunk overtopped by two ports looking out upon the main deck. At the after end a settee over which is my book-case. A chest of drawers, a shelf, a mirror, a framed photograph, a bottle-rack, and a shaving-strop adorn the starboard bulkhead. A door, placed midway in the opposite side, is hung with many clothes. A curtain screens my slumbers, and a ventilator in the ceiling chills my toes when turned to the wind. Ceiling and walls are painted dead white, with red wainscotting round the settee. Two engravings grace the only vacant spots on my walls—one a wild piece of wood and moorland, the road shining white after a late-autumn rain, with a gypsy van showing sharp against the lowering sky; the other a wintry lane with a waggon labouring in the snow. A patrol-jacket and a uniform cap hang over a pillow-case half full of dirty clothes. Such is my home at sea.

Look round while I shave. Quite possibly some may wonder that I should affect such commonplace pictures. They cost me threepence each, in Swansea. Well, I am not concerned with their merit as pieces of decorative art. When I look at that wet road and rainy sky, I go back in thought to the days when I lived near Barnet, and the world was mine on Sunday. I recall how I was wont to throw off my morning lethargy, get astride my bicycle, a pipe in one pocket and a book in the other, and plunge into the open country beyond Hadley Heath. It had rained, very likely, in the morning, and the roads were clean and fresh, and the trees were sweet after their bath. And as the afternoon closed in I would sit on a gate in some unfrequented lane and watch the red fog darken over London town. I was happy then, as few lads are, I think. Those long silences, those solitary communings; were mind-building all the time. So, when I came away from home and settled in Chelsea, and heard men talk, I felt that I, too, had something to say.

In like manner my snowscape takes me back to the time when I was a mechanic, engine-building near Aylesbury. We lived half a mile from the works, at an old inn, and we began at six o’clock. In winter time, I remember, we would snuggle into the big back kitchen, with its huge cauldron of pig-meat swinging over the open fire, and its barrels containing evil things like stoats and ferrets, to put on our boots; and when we opened the door, two feet of snow would fall in upon the floor. How well I remember that silent trudge up the bleak Birmingham Road to the works! There were always two broad ruts in the white roadway—the mail-coach had passed silently, at two o’clock. Cold, cold, cold! A white silence, save for our dark figures shuffling softly through the snow. And then a long eleven-hour day.