ere! whose life's the safest in the whole world
The poor mariner's. You look at the statistics, you'll see. So don't you
fool away any sympathy on the poor mariner's dangers and privations and
sufferings. Leave that to the poetry muffs. Now you look at the other
side a minute. Here is Captain Brace, forty years old, been at sea
thirty. On his way now to take command of his ship and sail south from
Bermuda. Next week he'll be under way; easy times; comfortable quarters;
passengers, sociable company; just enough to do to keep his mind healthy
and not tire him; king over his ship, boss of everything and everybody;
thirty years' safety to learn him that his profession ain't a dangerous
one. Now you look back at his home. His wife's a feeble woman; she's a
stranger in New York; shut up in blazing hot or freezing cold lodgings,
according to the season; don't know anybody hardly; no company but her
lonesomeness and her thoughts; husband gone six months at a time.
She has borne eight children; five of them she has buried without her
husband ever setting eyes on them. She watches them all the long nights
till they died--he comfortable on the sea; she followed them to the
grave she heard the clods fall that broke her heart he comfortable on
the sea; she mourned at home, weeks and weeks, missing them every day
and every hour--he cheerful at sea, knowing nothing about it. Now look
at it a minute--turn it over in your mind and size it: five children
born, she among strangers, and him not by to hearten her; buried,
and him not by to 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