He had believed in Santa Claus and the fairies, and he grew up with an ever increasing bump of imagination, contiguous to which, strange to relate, there was a properly developed bump of industry and application.

Hence, it is not surprising that he was willing to go far afield in search of the things that seemed more or less worth while to a young gentleman who had suffered the ill-fortune to be born in the nineteenth century instead of the seventeenth.

Romance and adventure, politely amorous but vigorously attractive, came up to him from the seventeenth century, perhaps through the blood of some swash-buckling ancestor, and he was held enthralled by the possibilities that lay hidden in some far off or even nearby corner of this hopelessly unromantic world of the twentieth century.
To be sure there was war, but war isn't Romance.

Besides, he was too young to fight against Spain; and, later on, he happened to be more interested in football than he was in the Japs or the Russians.

The only thing left for him to do was to set forth in quest of adventure; adventure was not likely to apply to him in Fifth Avenue or at the factory or--still, there was a certain kind of adventure analogous to Broadway, after all.