I absolutely love the illustrations in this book:  they evoke the mood, create the setting, and give personality to the characters.  The story itself is a nice tale of a young harbor cat who listens to the stories of the old cat who’s travelled the sea.  When young Jim insists he wants to share in such adventures, the two set off together to stow away on a sea-going boat.  And adventures they find, including seasickness and rats and waves and storms.  When they do make it safely back to the harbor young Jim is ready to return to the safety and familiarity of the harbor, but the old cat says he’s had enough of land and is setting out on one last voyage.  By the end of the story Jim has become the old cat telling of stories of adventures at sea to the younger kittens on shore.  My biggest gripe with this book (keeping it from getting a better rating) is not with the author or the illustrator, but with the editor/publisher — whoever it was who decided on the text layout.  Someone made the decision that the lines of text should be aligned along their centers, giving it the look of poetry, though it’s not, which interferes with having any proper paragraph indentations to show when their is a change in speaker: the result is that there are times when confusion over who is speaking interrupts the flow of the dialogue and the story.