essing a
measure of the other man's work: a large proportion of success hinges on
easy fellowship, on an understanding and acquaintance not only with the
technics of another's trade, but with his habits and his pursuits. All
trades, all businesses, all professions have relations, near or distant,
with the sea, but to them our grades and descriptions are dubious and
uncertain. For this we are to blame. We are bad advertisers. We are
content to leave our fraternization with the beach to the far distant
day when we shall retire from the sea-service, 'swallow the anchor,' and
settle down to longshore life. We cannot join and rejoin the guilderies
on shore in the intervals of our voyaging. We preserve a grudging
silence on our seafaring, perhaps tint what pictures we do present in
other lights than verity. The necessary aloofness of our calling makes
for a seclusion in our affairs: we make few efforts to remedy an
estrangement; in a way, we adopt the disciplinary scourge of the
flagellants, we glory in our isolation. If we share few of the
institutions that exist for fellowship ashore, we have made no bid for
admittance: if the tide of intercourse leaves us stranded, we have put
out no steering oar on the drift of the flood. We are somewhat
diffident. Perhaps we are influenced by a certain reputation that is
still attached to us. Are we the prodigals not yet in the mood to turn
unto our fathers?

Stout old Doctor Johnson enlarged on the sea-life--of his day--with a
determination and no small measure of accuracy. "Sir," he said, "a ship
is worse than a gaol. There is in a gaol better air, better company,
better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional
disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a sea-life they
are not fit to live on land. . . . Men go to the sea before they know
the unhappiness of that way of life; and when they have come to know it,
they cannot escape from it, because it is then too late to choose
another profession." At least he admitted the possibility of some of us
coming to _like_ a sea-life, though his postulate conveyed no high
opinion of our intelligence in such a preference.

We have travelled far since the worthy Doctor's day. Not all his dicta
may stand. There is still, perhaps, greater danger in a ship than in
gaol, but Johnson himself admitted that "the profession of sailors has
the dignity of danger"! For the rest, our air has become so good that
invalids are ordered