In 1895 Masefield returned to sea on a windjammer destined for New York City. However, the urge to become a writer and the hopelessness of life as a sailor overtook him, and in New York he jumped ship and travelled throughout the countryside. For several months he lived as a vagrant, drifting between odd jobs, before he returned to New York City and found work as a barkeeper's assistant. Some time around Christmas 1895 he read the December edition of "Truth", a New York periodical, which contained the poem "The Piper of Arll" by Duncan Campbell Scott. Ten years later Masefield wrote to Scott to tell him what reading that poem had meant to him: