Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/82

66 glad to do it, for it is the like of them and not the like of me that makes the big ships go. I vowed then that I would turn to and learn something, that I would study navigation yet and have a ship of my own some day. But I didn’t stick to it. I drifted here and drifted there, lost or spent my money the day after I  got to port, and had to ship again in any berth  I could.

“When I was here in New England I was always longing for a sight of palm trees, and  the hot sandy beaches, and the brown people  and their queer-built houses round the harbours at Singapore or Bankok or Bombay. But when I was there I was somehow always thinking of how our great, cool, grey rocks  looked along this coast with the surf tumbling  below and the pine covered hills behind them. I would remember the smell of bayberry and sweetbriar and mayflowers and think it would  be the breath of life to me. So it was always, drifting first in one direction and then in another, until I came to port at last  with less than I had when I put to sea. When I started out in life I was bound I would be a  sea-captain before I was twenty: now that I  am nearly four times that it hurts me still to