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I may, I trust, be permitted to remind my good friends, the public, to whom I owe so great a debt, that prior to going to sea I was, as some writers love to say, not entirely unconnected with trade, having for two or three years been employed with varying degrees of unsuccess by small tradesmen as an errand boy, etc. In this wise (although I feel sure that none of my employers would have suspected me of it), I absorbed some germs of a commercial spirit, did at any rate acquire the rudiments of trade, although in most irregular and entirely erratic ways.

During my sea-career, these germs lay entirely dormant, unfruitful; but they were undoubtedly tenacious of life, as we learn that disease germs always are; and so, when I forsook the sea upon an offer of a job ashore, a fitting environment aroused them, and they sprang into active life. Not of course immediately, a period of incubation was needed. It was readily forthcoming. At the age of twenty-five, I deliberately turned my back upon a profession that then offered me nothing better than mate of a tramp at £6 per month, and accepted a berth in a public office ashore at £2 per week, having a wife and one child, and no stick of furniture for a home.