ship sails?” It may have been his extreme good-nature, the serious, unsmiling good-nature of a fat, swarthy man with coal-black moustache and steady eyes; but he might have been a bit of a diplomatist, too.  His enticing suggestions I used to repel modestly by the assurance that it was extremely unlikely, as I had not enough experience.  “You know very well how to go about business matters,” he used to say, with a sort of affected moodiness clouding his serene round face.  I wonder whether he ever laughed to himself after I had left the office.  I dare say he never did, because I understand that diplomatists, in and out of the career, take themselves and their tricks with an exemplary seriousness.

But he had nearly persuaded me that I was fit in every way to be trusted with a command.  There came three months of mental worry, hard rolling, remorse, and physical pain to drive home the lesson of insufficient experience.

Yes, your ship wants to be humoured with knowledge.  You must treat with an understanding consideration the mysteries of her feminine nature, and then she will stand by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle with forces wherein defeat is no shame.  It is a serious relation, that in which a man stands to his ship.  She has her rights as though she could breathe and speak; and, indeed, there are ships that, for the right man, will do anything but speak, as the saying goes.

A ship is not a slave.  You must make her easy in a seaway, you must never forget that you owe her the fullest share of your thought, of your skill, of your self-love.  If you remember that obligation, naturally and without effort, as if it were an instinctive feeling of your inner life, she will sail, stay, run for you as long as she is able, or, like a sea-bird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that ever made you doubt living long enough to see another sunrise.

XVI.

Often I turn with melancholy eagerness to the space reserved in the newspapers under the general heading of “Shipping Intelligence.”  I meet there the names of ships I have known.  Every year some of these names disappear—­the names of old friends.  “Tempi passati!”

The different divisions of that kind of news are set down in their order, which varies but slightly in its arrangement of concise headlines.  And first comes “Speakings”—­reports of ships met and signalled at sea, name, port, where from, where bound for, so many days out, ending frequently with the words “All well.”  Then come “Wrecks and Casualties”—­a longish array of paragraphs, unless the weather has been fair and clear, and friendly to ships all over the world.

On some days there appears the heading “Overdue”—­an ominous threat of loss and sorrow trembling yet in the balance of fate.  There is something sinister to a seaman in the very grouping of the letters which form this word, clear in its meaning, and seldom threatening in vain.