I didn't wait to learn the result of my examinations.

I stowed a roll of blankets and some cold food into a borrowed whitehall boat and set sail.

Out of the Oakland Estuary I drifted on the last of an early morning ebb, caught the first of the flood up bay, and raced along with a spanking breeze.

San Pablo Bay was smoking, and the Carquinez Straits off the Selby Smelter were smoking, as I picked up ahead and left astern the old landmarks I had first learned with Nelson in the unreefer Reindeer.
Benicia showed before me.

I opened the bight of Turner's Shipyard, rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of the patch of tules and the clustering fishermen's arks where in the old days I had lived and drunk deep.
And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I never dreamed for many a long year to come.