Hosea invited me to his ampler room for daily conversations over the
friendly glass; we talked much, but not about the sea. His active mind,
after searching through the files of recent newspapers saved up during his
stay in port, had many an opinion on affairs less adjacent; and he had a
curious miscellany of reading at his service. Sir Edwin Arnold was one
of his few poets, and for him he spoke out most generously. Here I was
obliged to watch my behaviour. As a person engaged in literature, I
could not precisely admit the ignorance of the _Light of Asia_ which I
have always enjoyed; and I wished I had read it. The conversation should
have run upon the sharks, the hula hula, typhoon and the submarine
barrage, by rights; not upon the history in blank verse of the founder
of Buddhism. It was some relief to find Hosea turning to Tennyson, whose
works he had upon his desk. Shakespeare, he said, he had been advised
by old captains to leave alone until he had turned forty.

From his book cupboard he lent me several books, of which I only failed
to master one. This was _The Lone Star Ranger_, by Zane Grey; a fiction in
which beauty was reached through blood, but not in this world. Far more
romantic was a large official treatise styled _North Atlantic Directory_,
reading which, I determined never again to leave any book about ships
and the sea in the threepenny tub.

Meals, the important thing in the trenches, began to impress me as
furnishing the incidents of seafaring life. They seldom came too soon.
Their atmosphere puzzled me in a minor way, until I was acclimatized
to the habits of the saloon. Little would be said at them for a long
time; then some one would quietly mention some occurrence of technical
bearings in the first place, and so educed, a few anecdotes would follow.
Phillips, the chief engineer, with his seasoned air and dry ironical
ease of speech, was perhaps the narrator of the saloon. I remember his
first tale that I heard: it was simple, yet picturesque. "Once we were
running in the banana trade. We went to Labrador for some fish. The
captain was putting in to Cape Sidney, and he didn't like the look of
some of the lights. So he went down to the bottle and got blotto. The
second mate--a little Greek, he was--was on the bridge, and he found
the captain was blotto, and he'd never been to Cape Sidney before,
and he was worried out of his wits. So he came down and asked me what
he should do. 'I can't tell you