Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/179

 then discovered and were celebrating that day in the joy of our discovery. It was to me a discovery of the greatest charm, a charm that lasts to this day in everything the man has written, that charm of the sea and of ships, the romance and poetry of it all which I had felt ever since as a boy I found a noble friend in Gus Wright, an old sailor whose name I cannot speak even now without a quickening of the spirit because of the glamour that invested him when I sat and looked at him and realized that he had hunted whales in the South Pacific and had sailed the Seven Seas. I wish I had written him into the first of these papers, where he belongs; he made two miniature vessels for me, one a full rigged ship, the other a bark—dismantled now, both of them, alas, and long since out of commission

"You go down to the wharves along the East River," Steffens was saying, "and you'll see a ship come in, and after she has been made fast to her wharf, an old man will come out of the cabin, light his pipe, and lean over the taffrail; he'll have a brown, weather-beaten face, and as he leans there smoking slowly and peacefully, his voyage done, his eye roving calmly about here and there, you'll look at him, and say to yourself, 'Those eyes have seen everything in this world!'"

It was a rather big thought when you dwelt on it.

"He's seen everything in the world," Steffens went on, "but he can't tell what he's seen. Now Conrad has those eyes, he has seen everything, and he can tell it."

It was Joseph Conrad, of course, of whom we were