He gazed at me darkly out of his head, lying very still on the white pillow, for a time.

“Ah, yes, another half-hour.  That’s the way ships get dismasted.”

And that was all I got in the way of a wigging.  I waited a little while and then went out, shutting carefully the door of the state-room after me.

Well, I have loved, lived with, and left the sea without ever seeing a ship’s tall fabric of sticks, cobwebs and gossamer go by the board.  Sheer good luck, no doubt.  But as to poor P-, I am sure that he would not have got off scot-free like this but for the god of gales, who called him away early from this earth, which is 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 cheery temper, 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 prompt despatch, the very size of his ship, stand nowadays between the modern seaman and the thorough knowledge of his craft.