THE MATE OF THE VANCOUVER

I am going to write, not the history of my life, which, on the whole, has been as quiet as most mens, but simply the story of about a year of it, which, I think, will be almost as interesting to other folks as any yarn spun by a professional novel writer; and if I am wrong, it is because I havent the knowledge such have of the way to tell a story. As a friend of mine, who is an artist, says, I know I cant put in the foreground properly, but if I tell the simple facts in my own way, it will be true, and anything that is really true always seems to me to have a value of its own, quite independent of what the papers call "style," which a sailor, who has never written much besides a log and a few love-letters, cannot pretend to have. That is what I think. Our family—for somehow it seems as if I must begin at the beginning—was always given to the sea. There is a story that my great-grandfather was a pirate or buccaneer; my grandfather, I know, was in the Royal Navy, and my father commanded a China clipper when they used to make, for those days, such fast runs home with the new seasons tea.