three parts ocean, and therefore a fit abode for sailors. A few

years afterwards I met in an Indian port a man who had served in
the ships of the same company. Names came up in our talk, names of

our colleagues in the same employ, and, naturally enough, I asked
after P-. Had he got a command yet? And the other man answered

carelessly:
"No; but he's provided for, anyhow. A heavy sea took him off the

poop in the run between New Zealand and the Horn."
Thus P- passed away from amongst the tall spars of ships that he

had tried to their utmost in many a spell of boisterous weather.
He had shown me what carrying on meant, but he was not a man to

learn discretion from. He could not help his deafness. One can
only remember his cheerytemper, his admiration for the jokes in

PUNCH, his little oddities - like his strange passion for borrowing
looking-glasses, for instance. Each of our cabins had its own

looking-glass screwed to the bulkhead, and what he wanted with more
of them we never could fathom. He asked for the loan in

confidential tones. Why? Mystery. We made various surmises. No
one will ever know now. At any rate, it was a harmless

eccentricity, and may the god of gales, who took him away so
abruptly between New Zealand and the Horn, let his soul rest in

some Paradise of true seamen, where no amount of carrying on will
ever dismast a ship!

XIII.
There has been a time when a ship's chief mate, pocket-book in hand

and pencil behind his ear, kept one eye aloft upon his riggers and
the other down the hatchway on the stevedores, and watched the

disposition of his ship's cargo, knowing that even before she
started he was already doing his best to secure for her an easy and

quick passage.
The hurry of the times, the loading and discharging organization of

the docks, the use of hoisting machinery which works quickly and
will not wait, the cry for promptdespatch, the very size of his

ship, stand nowadays between the modern seaman and the thorough
knowledge of his craft.

There are profitable ships and unprofitable ships. The profitable
ship will carry a large load through all the hazards of the

weather, and, when at rest, will stand up in dock and shift from
berth to berth without ballast. There is a point of perfection in

a ship as a worker when she is spoken of as being able to SAIL
without ballast. I have never met that sort of paragon myself, but

I have seen these paragons advertised amongst ships for sale. Such
excess of virtue and good-nature on the part of a ship always

provoked my mistrust. It is open to any man to say that his ship
will sail without ballast; and he will say it, too, with every mark

of profoundconviction, especially if he is not going to sail in
her himself. The risk of advertising her as able to sail without

ballast is not great, since the statement does not imply a warranty
of her arriving anywhere. Moreover, it is strictly true that most

ships will sail without ballast for some little time before they
turn turtle upon the crew.

A shipowner loves a profitable ship; the seaman is proud of her; a
doubt of her good looks seldom exists in his mind; but if he can

boast of her more useful qualities it is an added satisfaction for
his self-love.

The loading of ships was once a matter of skill, judgment, and
knowledge. Thick books have been written about it. "Stevens on

Stowage" is a portly volume with the renown and weight (in its own
world) of Coke on Littleton. Stevens is an agreeablewriter, and,

as is the case with men of talent, his gifts adorn his sterling
soundness. He gives you the official teaching on the whole

subject, is precise as to rules, mentions illustrative events,
quotes law cases where verdicts turned upon a point of stowage. He

is never pedantic, and, for all his close adherence to broad
principles, he is ready to admit that no two ships can be treated

exactly alike.
Stevedoring, which had been a skilled labour, is fast becoming a

labour without the skill. The modern steamship with her many holds
is not loaded within the sailor-like meaning of the word. She is

filled up. Her cargo is not stowed in any sense; it is simply
dumped into her through six hatchways, more or less, by twelve

winches or so, with clatter and hurry and racket and heat, in a
cloud of steam and a mess of coal-dust. As long as you keep her

propeller under water and take care, say, not to fling down barrels
of oil on top of bales of silk, or deposit an iron bridge-girder of

five ton or so upon a bed of coffee-bags, you have done about all
in the way of duty that the cry for promptdespatch will allow you

to do.
XIV.

The sailing-ship, when I knew her in her days of perfection, was a
sensible creature. When I say her days of perfection, I mean

perfection of build, gear, seaworthy qualities and case of
handling, not the perfection of speed. That quality has departed

with the change of building material. No iron ship of yesterday
ever attained the marvels of speed which the seamanship of men

famous in their time had obtained from their wooden, copper-sheeted
predecessors. Everything had been done to make the iron ship

perfect, but no wit of man had managed to devise an efficient
coating composition to keep her bottom clean with the smooth

cleanness of yellow metal sheeting. After a spell of a few weeks
at sea, an iron ship begins to lag as if she had grown tired too

soon. It is only her bottom that is getting foul. A very little
affects the speed of an iron ship which is not driven on by a

merciless propeller. Often it is impossible to tell what
inconsiderate trifle puts her off her stride. A certain

mysteriousness hangs around the quality of speed as it was
displayed by the old sailing-ships commanded by a competentseaman.

In those days the speed depended upon the seaman; therefore, apart
from the laws, rules, and regulations for the good preservation of

his cargo, he was careful of his loading, - or what is technically
called the trim of his ship. Some ships sailed fast on an even

keel, others had to be trimmed quite one foot by the stern, and I
have heard of a ship that gave her best speed on a wind when so

loaded as to float a couple of inches by the head.
I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam - a flat foreground

of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts
of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the

Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled
ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set

ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging
slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master

stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his
chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozen-in

up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the
waste ground, and runningparallel with the line of ships, a line

of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs.
From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air

the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and
disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy

carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that
appeared no bigger than children.

I was, as the French say, biting my fists with impatience for that
cargo frozen up-country; with rage at that canal set fast, at the

wintry and deserted aspect of all those ships that seemed to decay
in grim depression for want of the open water. I was chief mate,

and very much alone. Directly I had joined I received from my
owners instructions to send all the ship's apprentices away on

leave together, because in such weather there was nothing for
anybody to do, unless to keep up a fire in the cabin stove. That

was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed, inconceivably dirty,
and weirdly toothless Dutch ship-keeper, who could hardly speak

three words of English, but who must have had some considerable
knowledge of the language, since he managed invariably to interpret

in the contrary sense everything that was said to him.
Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the ink froze on the swing-

table in the cabin, and I found it more convenient to go ashore
stumbling over the arctic waste-land and shivering in glazed

tramcars in order to write my evening letter to my owners in a
gorgeous cafe in the centre of the town. It was an immense place,

lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush, full of electric lights
and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble tables felt tepid to