usand tons of dead-weight cargo, is astonishing. To
me she is the most erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr. Pike, with whom I
now pace the poop on occasion, tells me that coal is a good cargo, and
that the _Elsinore_ is well-loaded because he saw to it himself.

He will pause abruptly, in the midst of his interminable pacing, in order
to watch her in her maddest antics. The sight is very pleasant to him,
for his eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his face and
impart to it a hint of ecstasy. The _Elsinore_ has a snug place in his
heart, I am confident. He calls her behaviour admirable, and at such
times will repeat to me that it was he who saw to her loading.

It is very curious, the habituation of this man, through a long life on
the sea, to the motion of the sea. There _is_ a rhythm to this chaos of
crossing, buffeting waves. I sense this rhythm, although I cannot solve
it. But Mr. Pike _knows_ it. Again and again, as we paced up and down
this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic seemed impending, he
would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the _Elsinore_ smashed down
on her side and heeled over and over with a colossal roll that seemed
never to end, and that always ended with an abrupt, snap-of-the-whip
effect as she began the corresponding roll to windward. In vain I strove
to learn how Mr. Pike forecasts these antics, and I am driven to believe
that he does not consciously forecast them at all. He _feels_ them; he
knows them. They, and the sea, are ingrained in him.

Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently
shaking off a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw. If ever, in an
hour, the _Elsinore_ had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I had
not noticed it. So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the next
moment the _Elsinore_ had smashed down and buried a couple of hundred
feet of her starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot down the
deck and smashed myself breathless against the wall of the chart-house.
My ribs and one shoulder are sore from it yet. Now how did he know?

And he never staggers nor seems in danger of being rolled away. On the
contrary, such a surplus of surety of balance has he that time and again
he lent his surplus to me. I begin to have more respect, not for the
sea, but for the men of the sea, and not for the sweepings of seamen that
are as slaves on our decks, but for the real seamen who are their
masters--for Ca