life?

I know a fireman, an efficient, brave man--a man with a record. One
night--we were in a drug store in a crowded city--he was answering the
argument of a man working in a big factory.

Said the fireman: "You're making your five or six--yes, and eight--dollars
a day, in lively times like now. All right. But the lively times will
pass, and there'll come weeks when you won't make any four or five or
six dollars a day, and there'll come weeks when you'll be on half-time.
Average it up and you won't get any more than I will in the long run. And
when I'm through, when I'm fifty-five, I get a pension, and with a few
good years left to me. And where are you then? Out on the street or some
home for the aged--if they will take you.

"Save money as I go along? I don't figure on it--not with a family and
trying to give them the kind of food they need and the little things
that live boys and girls--especially girls--care as much for as the grub
they eat and the clothes they wear. But if I do spend all my pay, my
family are getting the good of it, I don't go into the discard at the
end. And when I'm up on a shaky roof in a bad fire, maybe I'll be more
ready to take a chance, knowing that if I go through and cripple myself,
there's something coming to the wife and family after it."

The fireman's argument holds for the navy, except that in the navy they
get through younger and with a bigger pension.

Is there any romance in the navy nowadays? Who can answer for all?
Probably as much now as ever there was. Why should substituting
smoke-pipes for spars, and propellers for sails, kill the thing that
thrills us? I've seen men washing down decks of a tropic morning, and,
ninety miles inland, old Orizaba showing his white head above the
clouds; and some of those men thought it was slow work and others
thought it was great.

On a scout cruiser to African ports, or a thousand miles up a Chinese
river on a gunboat, among the South Sea Islands on a light cruiser, some
men return with dumb lips and others can keep you awake till morning
with the tales of what they've seen.

A nineteen-year-old big-gun pointer sits atop of his bicycle saddle, and
the enemy fleet is swinging into range. Will it be like shooting clay
pipes in a gallery or will a warmer wave go rolling through his veins as
he presses the button?

Romance! Is it something always dead and gone, or something a man carries
around with him?

Whatever it is, the navy is