And that, perhaps, is why I have made so much of my not very wonderful
prowess on that occasion; not, indeed, that I am physically a coward--at
least, I do not think so. If I thought I were I should avow it with no
more shame than I should avow that I had a bad digestion, or a weak
heart, which makes cowards of us all.
It is that I hate a row, and violence, and bloodshed, even from a
nose--any nose, either my own or my neighbor's.
* * * * *
There are slums at the east end of London that many fashionable people
know something of by this time; I got to know them by heart. In addition
to the charm of the mere slum, there was the eternal fascination of the
seafaring element; of Jack ashore--a lovable creature who touches
nothing but what he adorns it in his own peculiar fashion.
I constantly haunted the docks, where the smell of tar and the sight of
ropes and masts filled me with unutterable longings for the sea--for
distant lands--for anywhere but where it was my fate to be.
I talked to ship captains and mates and sailors, and heard many
marvellous tales, as the reader may well believe, and framed for myself
visions of cloudless skies, and sapphire seas, and coral reefs, and
groves of spice, and dusky youths in painted plumage roving, and
friendly isles where a lovely half-clad, barefooted Neuha would wave her
torch, and lead me, her Torquil, by the hand through caverns of bliss!
Especially did I haunt a wharf by London Bridge, from whence two
steamers--the _Seine_ and the _Dolphin_, I believe--started on alternate
days for Boulogne-sur-Mer.
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