such misgivings before the ink was dry on his Master's papers; but the misgivings were all the more ominous on that account.
They returned with strange emphasis when he boarded his new ship. "Been up to London, have you, Mr. Minas?" began the captain, by way of breaking the ice.
"Yes, sir," replied Paul—then whimsically added the familiar phrase from the ribald sailor song, "To see what I could see."
"Ay—and what did you see at all?"
It was at that moment that the misgivings returned; for how was he to tell a hearty skipper that he had seen a play by Barrie, caricatures by Max Beerbohm, quasilords and ladies bouncing upon tame steeds in Rotten Row, and—God save the mark—the Wallace Collection!
After two years consulting of and catering to a tyrannical set of tastes, desires and principles, Paul found unexpected refreshment in the simple routine of the sea, where superior officers shouldered the burden of making decisions. The sense of freedom he experienced as the Cranmore churned her way out of the Mersey was, in view of his duties, circumscribed, but he concluded that the sense of freedom in any one plane of being was contingent upon imprisonment of faculties in other planes; there was always a string to the kite. Abstract liberty, like the geometrical point, was merely a façon de parler—an unstable sea upon which only Peters were rash enough to walk, and from which only Peters were rescued. Shelley the poet, enamoured of liberty, impersonated a cloud and offered himself to the West Wind, but Shelley the citizen came croppers. Poor old Jean-Jacques, chained worshipper of liberty and reprehensible amateur of morality, while indulging in speculative vertiges, took care to keep his feet on the ground. "J'aime beaucoup
