A Tarpaulin Muster PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 Excerpt: ...it was nothing to him now. I was getting old; yet the thing came back to me, I took a part in it. The thing comes back to me; the tug, the green water, the negro with the cap, the masts of the ships at anchor. It is eternal, it is my youth, I am young in it. It is my friend who is old; it is he who has lost his youth, it has gone from him, it is dead, he has lived his vision. But when we get to our lighthouse he will have more of such tales to tell me than I to tell him. He has seen so much. He is still seeing so much. He will have a fuller memory to turn over, and arrange, and select from. And when our pipes are smoked out, and it is time for us to go to our hammocks, it is not great poetry we shall sing together. It will be the song we sang when we were comrades, when we sailed the green seas and saw the flying fish. It will be--I dreamed a dream the other night, Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John; I dreamed a dream the other night, My Lowlands a-ray, or some other song that comes with its memory of work done, its suggestion of storm and of stress and of adventure accomplished. XI A MEMORY In these first frosty days, now that there is mist at dusk into which the sun's red ball drops, one can gather to the fire as soon as the lamps are lit and take the old book from the shelf, the old tune from the fiddle, and the old memory from its cupboard in the brain. Memory is a thing of rags and patches, an odd heap of gear, a bag of orts. It is a record of follies, a jumble of sketch and etching, heaped anyhow, torn, broken, blurred. One can turn it over, and see now a deck scene, with a watch at the halliards, now a woman weeping, now a carthorse tearing down a road, scattering the crowd. That is the common, haphazard, perishing memory, which is what one has to s...