"My mother told me that my father nearly went crazy with joy when I was born one Sunday morning, 18 south, 21 west, at seven bells on the starboard watch. They were in the trade then, spanking along almost due north for Fernando Noronha. It was rum for all hands that morning, almost the only soft thing left on the ship, and a little tea. The tea came in handy for their pipes, my mother told me. Poor chaps! They were dying for a smoke. Well, I have always got a good deal of satisfaction from knowing everybody was glad I came into the world. My father was dancing mad to get home and tell all the folks that the curse was lifted. He promised my mother anything; a home in London was one thing. He said he would quit the sea, for another. And he kept his word too. He was going on fifty-five, and had been at sea for thirty-eight years. Think of that! I've been at it for fifteen years now, and it seems an infernally long time. Thirty-eight years!
"So they settled in England. I don't know whether you people can see it plainly, but if you think a little you will realize how strange those two felt in London, with their Saratoga trunks, their sea habits and their American prejudices. Can you?"
He looked from one to the other as we sat there, our chairs twisted a little so that we could see his face. The question was a shrewd one. I remember wondering if he was aware how vividly it brought back to our minds our first few weeks in San Francisco, our mistakes, our petulant anger with strange habits, our feeling of awful homesickness. Again we nodded silently.
"For a time they were up against it, you would say," he went on, "and they didn't dare to move away from their lodgings in the East India Dock Road. It was natural for my father to think he ought to live near the ships. The custom of living in the suburbs, commuting as they call it here, hadn't begun in the seventies. It was my mother who fired his ambition to live further out. It would have been all right and everything might have been different if his ambition hadn't been fired in another direction at the same time.
"My father had done well on the whole. He had saved for years and kept his money in banks or in ships, which he understood. But now, when the _Erin's Isle_ was sold and he found himself worth about fifty thousand dollars, he began to invest in all sorts of queer ventures. He wanted to double his fortune before he died. Others had done it, men he met in Leadenhall Street and on the Baltic; why shouldn't he? You see, he had got hold of the _masculine_ part of my mother's ambition all right. She wanted to have an establishment, like a lady; he wanted to found a family in England. The money he was to make was for me. I was, he had settled, to be an engineer. He saw, that with steel coming in, engineering was to be the great gold-mine of the future. So he would provide the capital by which I was to build up a huge fortune. The Carvilles were to be big people, understand; '_my_ son was to be Prime Minister some day,' Humph!"