AUTHOR'S NOTE
Less perhaps than any other book written by me, or anybody else, does this volume require a preface. Yet since all the others including even the "Personal Record," which is but a fragment of biography, are to have their Author's Notes I cannot possibly leave this one without, lest a false impression of indifference or weariness should be created. I can see only too well that it is not going to be an easy task. Necessity—the mother of invention—being even unthinkable in this case, I do not know what to invent in the way of discourse; and necessity being also the greatest possible incentive to exertion I don't even know how to begin to exert myself. Here, too, the natural inclination comes in. I have been all my life averse from exertion.
Under these discouraging circumstances I am, however, bound to proceed from a sense of duty. This Note is a thing promised. In less than a mlnute's time, by a few incautious words I entered into a bond which has lain on my heart heavily ever since.
For, this book is a very intimate revelation; and what that is revealing can a few more pages add to some three hundred others of most sincere diselosures? I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life; went on full of love's delight and
vii
