struck by the men's extraordinary _isolation_ of mind; you may
not understand his thought now, but, when you visit the North Sea, the
meaning will flash on you. _Isolation_--that is the word; the men know
little of the world; they are infantine without being petty; they have
no curiosity about the passage of events on shore, and their solid world
is represented by an area of 70 feet by 18. They are always amusing,
always suggestive, and always superhumanly ignorant of the commonest
concerns that affect the lives of ordinary men. When your intellect
first begins to measure theirs, you feel as if you had been put down in
a strange country, and had to adapt your mind and soul to such a set of
conditions as might come before you in a dream. I, the transcriber of
this history, felt humiliated when a good man, who had been to sea for
thirty-three years on a stretch, asked me whether "them things is only
made up"; them things being a set of spirited natural history pictures.
I reckon if I took Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Grant Allen, or Mr. Lang
out to the fleets, I could give them a few shrewd observations regarding
the infancy of the human mind.

There was a fair amount of room for a religious service, the men packed
themselves into their places with admirable and silent politeness, and
the yacht was transformed into a mission hall. As to the fishermen's
singing, one can never talk of it sufficiently. Ferrier was stirred by
the hoarse thunder of voices; he seemed to hear the storming of that
gale in the cordage once more, and he forgot the words of the hymn in
feeling only the strong passion and yearning of the music. Then
Fullerton and Blair prayed, and the sceptic heard two men humbly
uttering petitions like children, and, to his humorous Scotch intellect,
there was something nearly amusing in the naive language of these two
able, keen men. They seemed to say, "Some of our poor men cannot do so
much as think clearly yet; we will try to translate their dumb craving."
Charles Dickens, that good man, that very great man, should have heard
the two evangelists; he would have altered some of the savage opinions
that lacerated his gallant heart. To me, the talk and the prayers of
such men are entrancing as a merely literary experience; the balanced
simplicity, and the quivering earnestness are so exactly adapted to the
one end desired.

Blair's sermon was brief and straightforward; he talked no secondhand
formalities from the te