nhealthful
that men should be totally separated from women and herd through the
world by themselves. Coarseness and savagery are the inevitable results.
These men about me should have wives, and sisters, and daughters; then
would they be capable of softness, and tenderness, and sympathy. As it
is, not one of them is married. In years and years not one of them has
been in contact with a good woman, or within the influence, or
redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a creature. There is
no balance in their lives. Their masculinity, which in itself is of the
brute, has been over-developed. The other and spiritual side of their
natures has been dwarfed--atrophied, in fact.

They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one another and
growing daily more calloused from the grinding. It seems to me
impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers. It would appear that
they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein there is
no such thing as sex; that they are hatched out by the sun like turtle
eggs, or receive life in some similar and sordid fashion; and that all
their days they fester in brutality and viciousness, and in the end die
as unlovely as they have lived.

Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with Johansen
last night--the first superfluous words with which he has favoured me
since the voyage began. He left Sweden when he was eighteen, is now
thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once. He
had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some sailor
boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.

"She must be a pretty old woman now," he said, staring meditatively into
the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who was
steering a point off the course.

"When did you last write to her?"

He performed his mental arithmetic aloud. "Eighty-one; no--eighty-two,
eh? no--eighty-three? Yes, eighty-three. Ten years ago. From some
little port in Madagascar. I was trading.

"You see," he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother across
half the girth of the earth, "each year I was going home. So what was
the good to write? It was only a year. And each year something
happened, and I did not go. But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at
'Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a
windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money;
and