cunning personal adornments are now reserved to the Royal Artillery and
officers of the Indian Army! Tarry hands? Tar is as scarce on a modern
steamer as strawberries in December! Sea-togs? If there be a preference,
we have a fondness for blue serge, but blue serges have quite a vogue
among bankers and merchants and other men of substance! Away from our
ships and the dockside waterfront, we are not readily recognizable; we
join the masses of other workers, we become members of the general
public. As such, we may lay claim to a common liberty, and look at our
seafaring selves from an average point of longshore view.

. . . The sea? Oh, we know a lot about it! It is in us. We pride
ourselves, an island race, we have the sea in our blood, we are born to
it. Circumstances may have brought us to counting-house and ledger, but
our heart is with the sea. We use, unwittingly, many nautical terms in
our everyday life. We had been to sea at times, on a business voyage or
for health or pleasure. We knew the captain and the mates and the
engineers. The chief steward was a friend, the bos'n or quartermaster
had shown us the trick of a sheepshank or a reef-knot or a short splice.
Their ways of it! Port and starboard for left and right, knots for
miles, eight bells, the watches, and all that! We returned from our
sea-trip, parted with our good friends, feeling hearty and refreshed. We
hummed, perhaps, a scrap of a sea-song at the ledgers. We regretted that
our sea-day had come so quickly to an end. Anyway, we felt that we had
got to know the sea-people intimately.

But that was on their ground, on the sea and the ship, where they fitted
to the scheme of things and were as readily understood and appreciated
as the little round port-holes, the narrow bunks, the cunning tip-up
washstands, the rails for hand-grip in a storm. Their atmosphere, their
stories, their habits, were all part of our sea-piece. Taken from their
heaving decks and the round of a blue horizon, they seemed to go out of
our reckoning. On shore? Of course they must at times come on shore, but
somehow one doesn't know much about them there. There are our
neighbours. . . . Yes! Gudgeon's eldest boy, he is at sea--a mate or a
purser. He has given over wearing his brass buttons and a badge cap now:
we see him at long intervals, when he comes home to prepare for
examinations. A hefty sort of lad--shouldn't think he would do much in
the way of study; a bit wild perhaps. Then