l
party he please, to be of any nationality he please, provided he speak
the language of the state; each of whom is medically attended by the
state; and, finally, each of whom can snap his fingers at every
Utopia-monger since Plato, and call him a fool who makes paradises for
other fools to dwell in. So, I say, the ship is a perfect state, its
very perfection being attested by the desire of its inhabitants to end
their days elsewhere.

Joking aside, though, I fear my notions of sailor-men have been sadly
jarred since I began to study them. Writing with one eye on this
master-mariner of ours, I call to mind certain conceptions of the
sailor-man which my youthful mind gathered from books and relations.
He was an honest, God-fearing man; slightly superstitious certainly,
slightly forcible in his language at times, slightly garrulous when
telling you about the _Sarah Sands_; but all these were as spots on
the sun. He was just and upright towards all men, never dreamed of
making money "on his own," and read prayers aloud on Sunday morning to
the assembled seamen.

Humph! I own I cannot imagine this skipper reading anything aloud
to his crew except the Riot Act, and he would not get more than
half-way through that if his cartridges were dry. There is a brutal,
edge-of-civilization look in his cold blue eye which harmonizes ill
with the Brixton address on the letters he sends to his wife.

Ah, well! Sometimes, when I think of this man and his like, when I
think of my puny attempts to creep into their skins, I must need
laugh, lest, like Beaumarchais, I should weep. What, after all, do I
know of him? What is there in my armoury to pierce this impenetrable
outer-man? Once, when I was Browning-mad, I began an epic. Yes, I, an
epic! I pictured the hordes of civilisation sweeping over an immense
and beautiful mountain, crushing, destroying, manufacturing, and the
burden of their cry was a scornful text of Ruskin's--"We do not come
here to look at the mountain"; and they shouted, "Stand aside." And
then, when the mountain lay blackened, and dead, and disembowelled,
out of the hordes of slaves came a youth who would not work and
thereby lose his soul; so he set out on a pilgrimage. And the burden
of _his_ song was "the hearts of men."

"_And the cry went up to the roofs again,
Show me the way to the hearts of men._"

But, alas! by the time I had got back into blank verse again, he had
fallen in love, and as far as I