Excerpt from Opportunities in Merchant Ships Hankering for being run any more by their parents and their teachers. I've only known one fellow in my life who left school when he was fifteen to go to sea and then had the gumption to quit the sea after a year and a half, although he was enjoying it, in order to finish high school, so that in the end he would be a better ship's officer than a lot of men he saw getting ahead at sea just by rule of thumb. He figured he had been broken in to the sea, had a line on its possibilities, liked it, and so would leave it for a while in order to enjoy it all the more when he returned to it, because he would have easier command of all its possibilities, be in the best of shape for getting all it had to offer. Most boys aren't like that, though, and if they quit school too early they've quit for good and all, and will seem to have an advantage until they're about twenty five, and then they'll see the fellows with a better education forging ahead into the jobs that call for head-work, while at the same time they've picked up the handiness about a ship, too. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.