"
"How about those trips 'round the Horn, on the clipper ship 'Mary Jane'
from '49 to '55?"
"I was thar." They kept relentlessly on down the list, and then showed
him the tally. Allowing for infancy, an abbreviated boyhood on land, and
the time they had known him since he had quit the sea, he was one
hundred and thirty-five years old. The showing did not disconcert him,
however. He was interested, but he had told those stories so often and
had come to believe each of them so implicitly that he could not doubt
them in the aggregate. He simply exclaimed: "Well, I'll be darned! I
feel like a young chap o' sixty."
But while some of these old sailors liked to "spin yarns" and some had
their frailties, they were, as a rule, strong characters, rugged,
honest, courageous, unselfish--real men, in fact, whose sterling
qualities stood out in strong contrast against the unreality of many
timid and non-effective lives about them. It was not their romancing,
but their reality, and the achieving power of their lives that appealed
to me as a boy, and I was drawn to the kind of life that had helped to
produce such men.
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