ense of duty pricks
again.

[Illustration: AH, CONFIDENCES BESIDE A LIFE-BOAT ON THE UPPER DECK!]

That the smoke-room is iniquitous, I own--as iniquitous as a comfortable
club, with nice dark wainscoting, leather chairs and couches, and
little bells to touch when good cigars and other things are wanted. It
is, therefore, quite the nicest place on the whole ship.

My deck-walking friends will not subscribe to this, of course. They call
my smoke-room views and habits anything but healthy, and urge me to come
out upon the cold and slippery decks, and get the chilly "benefits" of
being on the sea. Alas! there is but one benefit for me, and that is
Europe. I detest the sea. I abhor it with an awful loathing. It offends
alike my physical system and my sense of proportion. It is too
sickeningly out of scale, too hideously large!

Do not fancy that I object to water, as such. In glasses, in bath-tubs,
under bridges, or trimmed with swans and water-lilies, water is all well
enough. But to put so much of it in one place is a wasteful, vulgar
show!

You see that I am telling you the truth about the sea. I am not one to
sit upon the shore and write you poetry (of the kind that is described
as rollicking) about it. What occupation could be more despicable than
that of making sea-songs to mislead the public?

The sea! The sea! The open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.

Do you grasp the ambiguity, the subtle trickery of that last line? What
does it really mean? It means that Bryan W. Procter, who wrote it, had
to be upon the shore to love the sea; that the more he was upon the
shore the more he loved the sea and that the more he was upon the sea
the more he loved the shore. In other words, he loathed the sea, as I
do. And I am told he hardly left his native England for dread of the
Channel trip.

As for Coleridge, Cunningham, and Campbell, it is only too evident that
they wrote sea-songs in vain celebration of their own initials. Byron
and Wallace Irwin were probably bribed by the transatlantic steamship
companies and the Navy Department.

And not one of them is a realist. There have been two realists who have
written poetry of the sea. One is Shakespeare, who wrote: "Now would I
give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground." The other
is James Montgomery Flagg, who in his "All in the Same Boat" exposes the
sea d