two anchors on a lee shore in a screaming southeaster.

Hard work and excitement? Let the wind baffle and drop in a heavy tide-
way just as you are sailing your little sloop through a narrow
draw-bridge. Behold your sails, upon which you are depending, flap with
sudden emptiness, and then see the impish wind, with a haul of eight
points, fill your jib aback with a gusty puff. Around she goes, and
sweeps, not through the open draw, but broadside on against the solid
piles. Hear the roar of the tide, sucking through the trestle. And hear
and see your pretty, fresh-painted boat crash against the piles. Feel
her stout little hull give to the impact. See the rail actually pinch
in. Hear your canvas tearing, and see the black, square-ended timbers
thrusting holes through it. Smash! There goes your topmast stay, and
the topmast reels over drunkenly above you. There is a ripping and
crunching. If it continues, your starboard shrouds will be torn out.
Grab a rope--any rope--and take a turn around a pile. But the free end
of the rope is too short. You can't make it fast, and you hold on and
wildly yell for your one companion to get a turn with another and longer
rope. Hold on! You hold on till you are purple in the face, till it
seems your arms are dragging out of their sockets, till the blood bursts
from the ends of your fingers. But you hold, and your partner gets the
longer rope and makes it fast. You straighten up and look at your hands.
They are ruined. You can scarcely relax the crooks of the fingers. The
pain is sickening. But there is no time. The skiff, which is always
perverse, is pounding against the barnacles on the piles which threaten
to scrape its gunwale off. It's drop the peak! Down jib! Then you run
lines, and pull and haul and heave, and exchange unpleasant remarks with
the bridge-tender who is always willing to meet you more than half way in
such repartee. And finally, at the end of an hour, with aching back,
sweat-soaked shirt, and slaughtered hands, you are through and swinging
along on the placid, beneficent tide between narrow banks where the
cattle stand knee-deep and gaze wonderingly at you. Excitement! Work!
Can you beat it in a calm day on the deep sea?

I've tried it both ways. I remember labouring in a fourteen days' gale
off the coast of New Zealand. We were a tramp collier, rusty and
battered, with six thousand tons of coal in our hold. Life lines were
stretched fore