Old Man Guthrie of the _Gondomar_ when I was seventeen," he thought.
"It's a good age...."

When he was seventeen.... He was not at all sure that those three years
he had spent at sea were not the best time of his life. It came back to
him, the salt enchantment of that time; the excitement in his heart, the
ironic serenity of the surrounding world, on that dawn when he stood on
the deck of his first ship as it sailed out of the Thames to the open
sea. The mouth of the river was barred by a rosy, drowsy sunrise; the
sky had lost its stars, and had blenched, and was being flooded by a
brave daylight blue; the water was changing from a sad silver width to a
sheet of white silk, creased with blue lines; the low hills on the
southern bank and the flat spit between the estuary and the Medway were
at first steamy shapes that might have drowned seamen's dreams of land,
but they took on earthly colours as he watched; and to the north Kerith
Island, that had been a blackness running weedy fingers out into the
flood, showed its farms and elms standing up to their middles in mist.
He went to the side and stared at the ridge of hills that lay behind the
island, that this picture should be clear in his mind at the last if the
storms should take him. There were the four crumbling grey towers of
Roothing Castle; and eastward there was Roothing Church, with its squint
spire and its sea-gnarled yews about it, and at its base the dazzling
white speck which he knew to be his father's tomb. He hated that he
should be able to see it even from here. All his life that mausoleum had
enraged him. He counted it a kind of cowardice of his father to have
died before his son was a man. He suspected him of creeping into his
coffin as a refuge, of wearing its lead as armour, from fear of his
son's revenges; and the choice of so public a sanctuary as this massive
tomb on the hillside was a last insolence.