comfort her; think of that! Sympathy for the poor mariner's perils is
rot; give it to his wife's hard lines, where it belongs! Poetry makes
out that all the wife worries about is the dangers her husband's running.
She's got substantialer things to worry over, I tell you. Poetry's
always pitying the poor mariner on account of his perils at sea; better a
blamed sight pity him for the nights he can't sleep for thinking of how
he had to leave his wife in her very birth pains, lonesome and
friendless, in the thick of disease and trouble and death. If there's
one thing that can make me madder than another, it's this sappy, damned
maritime poetry!"

Captain Brace was a patient, gentle, seldom speaking man, with a pathetic
something in his bronzed face that had been a mystery up to this time,
but stood interpreted now since we had heard his story. He had voyaged
eighteen times to the Mediterranean, seven times to India, once to the
arctic pole in a discovery-ship, and "between times" had visited all the
remote seas and ocean corners of the globe. But he said that twelve
years ago, on account of his family, he "settled down," and ever
since then had ceased to roam. And what do you suppose was this
simple-hearted, lifelong wanderer's idea of settling down and ceasing to
roam? Why, the making of two five-month voyages a year between Surinam
and Boston for sugar and molasses!

Among other talk to-day, it came out that whale-ships carry no doctor.
The captain adds the doctorship to his own duties. He not only gives
medicines, but sets broken limbs after notions of his own, or saws them
off and sears the stump when amputation seems best. The captain is
provided with a medicine-chest, with the medicines numbered instead of
named. A book of directions goes with this. It describes diseases and
symptoms, and says, "Give a teaspoonful of No. 9 once an hour," or "Give
ten grains of No. 12 every half-hour," etc. One of our sea-captains came
across a skipper in the North Pacific who was in a state of great
surprise and perplexity. Said he:

"There's something rotten about this medicine-chest business. One of my
men was sick--nothing much the matter. I looked in the book: it said
give him a teaspoonful of No. 15. I went to the medicine-chest, and I
see I was out of No. 15. I judged I'd got to get up a combination
somehow that would fill the bill; so I hove into the fellow half a
teaspoonful of No. 8 and half a teaspoonful o