the Shutter Rock, while the unseen kittiwakes were voices from the
past; and we might still see Miss Muffet tiptoe on a June morning to
smell the first rose. That is what we look for in books, or something
like it, and when it is not there they are not books to us.

XVIII. Sailor Language

FEBRUARY 1, 1919. "What's in a word?" asks Admiral W. H. Smyth, with
ironic intent, in his _Sailors' Word Book_. There are people who are
derided because they are inclined to hesitate over that unimportant
doubt, selecting their words with a waste of time which is grievous, when
the real value of the sovereign is but nine and ninepence, in an
uneconomic desire to be as right as their knowledge will allow. There is
something to be said for them. There is a case to be made for getting a
task finished as well as one knows how, if interest in it was sufficient
to prompt a beginning. A friend of mine, who could write a thousand
interesting and popular words about an event, or even about nothing in
particular, while I was still wondering what I ought to do with it, once
exclaimed in indignation and contempt when I put in a plea for Roget and
his _Thesaurus_. He declared that a writer who used such a reference-book
ought to be deprived of his paper and ink. _He_ never used even a
dictionary. His argument and the force of it humbled me, for I gathered
that when he wrote he had but to put his hand in his pocket and pull out
all the words he wanted by the fistful. I envy him. I wish I could do it,
but there are times when every word I try seems opaque. It is useless to
pretend that Roget is of material assistance then; for what remedy is
there under heaven for the slow and heavy mind? But to me Roget is full
of amusing suggestions, which would really have been very helpful to me
had I wanted to use his words for any other purpose than the one in hand.
It is true he rarely gives you the word you think you want, but not
seldom in his assorted heaps of unused ornaments you are surprised by a
glance of colour from an unsuspected facet of a common word.

The _Sailor's Word Book_ is no pamphlet; not in the least the kind of
pocket book which once helped hurried British soldiers in a French shop
to get fried eggs. It weighs, I should think, seven pounds, and it is
packed with the vocabulary which has been built into the British ship
during the thousand years and more of her growth. The origin of very many
of the words retires, often beyond ex