re strong who know neither doubts nor hopes.
They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly
and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as
whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work
in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil,
privation, violence, debauchery--but knew not fear, and had no desire
of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire;
voiceless men--but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental
voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique
and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege
of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and, indispensable,
without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home--and
died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They were the
everlasting children of the mysterious sea. Their successors are the
grown-up children of a discontented earth. They are less naughty, but
less innocent; less profane, but perhaps also less believing; and if
they have learned how to speak they have also learned how to whine. But
the others were strong and mute; they were effaced, bowed and enduring,
like stone caryatides that hold up in the night the lighted halls of
a resplendent and glorious edifice. They are gone now--and it does not
matter. The sea and the earth are unfaithful to their children: a truth,
a faith, a generation of men goes--and is forgotten, and it does not
matter! Except, perhaps, to the few of those who believed the truth,
confessed the faith--or loved the men.

A breeze was coming. The ship that had been lying tide-rode swung to
a heavier puff; and suddenly the slack of the chain cable between the
windlass and the hawse-pipe clinked, slipped forward an inch, and rose
gently off the deck with a startling suggestion as of unsuspected life
that had been lurking stealthily in the iron. In the hawse-pipe the
grinding links sent through the ship a sound like a low groan of a
man sighing under a burden. The strain came on the windlass, the chain
tautened like a string, vibrated--and the handle of the screw-brake moved
in slight jerks. Singleton stepped forward.

Till then he had been standing meditative and unthinking, reposeful
and hopeless, with a face grim and blank--a sixty-year-old child of
the mysterious sea. The thoughts of all his lifetime could have been
expressed in six words, but th