The average seaman has always expressed himself with unmistakable clearness on matters pertaining to his profession.  I was walking down the main street of a seafaring town some years ago, when I saw a group of people standing at a window looking at an oil-painting of a large, square-rigged ship which had been caught in a squall.  The royals and top-gallant sails had been let fly, and they were supposed to be flapping about as sails will in a squall if the yards are not trimmed so as to keep them quiet.  There were two sailors in the group who were criticising the painting with some warmth:  the ropes were not as they should be, the braces and stays were not properly regulated, and “Whoever saw sails flying about like that!” said the more voluble of the two.  The other dryly retorted, “I don’t know, mister, what you think, but I want to say that I have seen them cut some d——­ funny capers at times!” This very sailor-like sally both tickled the audience and convinced it that the sails were really correctly drawn.

On another occasion, during the prevalence of one of the most terrible easterly gales that ever visited the north-east coast, a multitude of people had congregated on the south pier at the mouth of the Tyne to witness the vessels making for the great Northern Harbour.  The sight was awful in its peculiar beauty, the foam fluted and danced on the troubled air until it found a resting place far up the inner reaches of the harbour.  There were seen in the distance two sailing vessels labouring amid a wrathful commotion of roaring seas.  As they approached the harbour the excitement became universal.  Women stood there transfixed with dread lest the storm-tossed vessels should be conveying some of their beloved relations to a tragic doom.  Two gentlemen of clerical voice and appearance conversed with obvious agitation, one of whom audibly spoke of the grandeur and picturesque charm of the flurry of wild waters.  “Look at them,” said he, “as they curtsey and rustle along to the kiss of the tempest.  Oh, it is a magnificent sight!” A few burly, weather-beaten sailors stood hard by.  It soon became apparent that their professional pride had been touched by the poetic babble to which they had listened.  One of them took upon himself the task of interjecting what the practical opinion of himself and friends was by addressing the aesthetic dreamer in accents of stern reproof:  “You,” said he, “may call it grandeur and picturesque and magnificent and curtseying, but we call it a damned dirty business.  If you were aboard of one of them, you wouldn’t talk about rustling through the cloven sea to the kiss of the tempest, you would be too tarnation keen on getting ashore!”