dreaming,
topaz eyes, spunkless. Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest of
the crew, aliens by lack of any word of common speech, nevertheless they
are good sailors and are always first to spring into any enterprise of
work or peril. They have gone into Mr. Mellaire's watch, and they are
quite apart from the rest of the sailors. And when there is a delay, or
wait, with nothing to do for long minutes, they shoulder together, and
stand and sway to the heave of deck, and dream far dreams in those pale,
topaz eyes, of a country, I am sure, where mothers, with pale, topaz eyes
and sandy hair, birth sons and daughters that breed true in terms of
topaz eyes and sandy hair.

But the rest of the crew! Take the Maltese Cockney. He is too keenly
intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure. He is a
shadow of his former self. His cheeks have fallen in. Dark circles of
suffering are under his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and English
intermingled, are cavernously sunken and as bright-burning as if aflame
with fever.

Tom Spink, hard-fibred Anglo-Saxon, good seaman that he is, long tried
and always proved, is quite wrecked in spirit. He is whining and
fearful. So broken is he, though he still does his work, that he is
prideless and shameless.

"I'll never ship around the Horn again, sir," he began on me the other
day when I greeted him good morning at the wheel. "I've sworn it before,
but this time I mean it. Never again, sir. Never again."

"Why did you swear it before?" I queried.

"It was on the _Nahoma_, sir, four years ago. Two hundred and thirty
days from Liverpool to 'Frisco. Think of it, sir. Two hundred and
thirty days! And we was loaded with cement and creosote, and the
creosote got loose. We buried the captain right here off the Horn. The
grub gave out. Most of us nearly died of scurvy. Every man Jack of us
was carted to hospital in 'Frisco. It was plain hell, sir, that's what
it was, an' two hundred and thirty days of it."

"Yet here you are," I laughed; "signed on another Horn voyage."

And this morning Tom Spink confided the following tome:

"If only we'd lost the carpenter, sir, instead of Boney."

I did not catch his drift for the moment; then I remembered. The
carpenter was the Finn, the Jonah, the warlock who played tricks with the
winds and despitefully used poor sailormen.

* * * * *

Yes, and I make free to confess that I have grown well weary of this
eterna