as not smiling at the
insane life he had led. For me, in spite of my sea-going business, life
was settled, sedentary, monotonous. You can talk if you like of the
romance of the sea, you may call it picturesque, but you cannot call it
melodramatic. Personally I dislike melodrama. I dislike violent passion
of any sort. I was thinking of all this and, as I say, smiling, when I
heard tip-toes behind me, and before I could turn round I felt my throat
held between two hands and my head pulled sharp over the back of the
seat."

Once again Mr. Carville paused, opened his little brass box and took
therefrom his piece of twist. With meticulous precision he pared and
pared the required amount for his pipe, and began to roll it between his
palms, his eyes fixed reflectively upon the geranium tubs. He had pushed
his hat back a little, and above his steady grey-blue eyes there shone a
pink unruffled brow.

"Once or twice in my life," he went on, "I have had a severe shock. Let
me explain what I mean. A man brought up as I had been, in a genteel
way, gets unaccustomed to physical violence. At school fighting was
barred very strictly. In the works we pupils had no need to speak to the
men at all. The first time I was ever struck was when I was a pupil. One
of the apprentices thought I had been at his tools, came up and hit me a
terrific blow on the chin. To anybody used to fighting it would have
been nothing. It made me ill for a week. Of course, at sea I'd grown a
good bit harder, but I'll never forget the first time a fireman went for
me. There was always with me a feeling of outrage so to speak, a feeling
not at all towards the man who struck me, you understand, but against
myself, against a world that had made me what I was, soft and unskilled.
That seems to me a peculiar weakness in our genteel civilization. You
go along, for years perhaps, living a quiet, orderly, intellectual
life, protected by law, by the Army and Navy, by the Police and by all
'the conventions of good society,' and then suddenly a man comes up and
gives you a punch on the jaw! A very weak place in our civilization, I
think?

"And, moreover, it brings into sharp relief another feature of our
civilized life and that is our impotence to utilize our total
experience. With a dog, a tiger, or a savage at the moment of attack,
all his instincts, all his habits, all his intuition and ingenuity and
physical advantage are automatically rushed to the front and flung u