He left Sweden when he was eighteen, is now thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once. He had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.
? ? ? ? 'She must be a pretty old woman now,' he said, staring meditatively into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who was steering a point off the course.
? ? ? ? 'When did you last write to her?'
? ? ? ? He performed his mental arithmetic aloud. 'Eighty-one; no- eighty-two, eh? no- eighty-three? Yes, eighty-three. Ten years ago. From some little port in Madagascar. I was trading.'
? ? ? ? 'You see,' he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother across half the girth of the earth, 'each year I was going home. So what was the good to write? It was only a year. And each year something happened, and I did not go. But I am mate now, and when I pay off at 'Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money; and then I will pay my passage from there home.
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