All this is your personal gift:  it is no necessary part of the master’s equipment to be so gracefully conversable.  Of the graver side of the sea captain’s life, though you say little, we see it unconsciously written in your bearing.  Some of us, who know just a little about it, can guess something of its burdens, its vigils, and its courages.  There is something significant in the obscure instinct that some of your friends have to seize what opportunity they can of seeing you in your own quarters when you are in port.  For though a ship in dock is a ship fettered and broken of much of her life and meaning, yet in the captain’s cabin the landsman feels something of that fine, faithful, and rigorous way of life.  It is a hard life, he knows; a life of stringent seriousness, of heavy responsibilities:  and yet it is a life for which we are fool enough to speak the fool’s word of envy.  It is a life spared the million frittering interruptions and cheerful distractions that devil the journalist; it is a life cut down to the essentials of discipline, simplicity, and service; a life where you must, at necessity, be not merely navigator but magistrate, employer, and priest.  Birth, death, and all the troubles that lie between, fall under your sway, and must find you unperturbed.  But, when you go out of that snug cabin for your turn of duty, at any rate you have the dark happiness of knowing that you go to a struggle worthy your powers, the struggle with that old, immortal, unconquerable, and yet daily conquered enemy, the Sea.

And so you go and come, you go and come, and we learn to count on your regular appearance every four weeks as we would on any stated gesture of the zodiac.  You come eager to pick up the threads of what has been happening in this our town, what books people are talking about, what is the latest jape, and what (your tastes being so catholic!) “Percy and Ferdie” are up to.  And you, in turn, bring news of what they are saying in Sauchiehall Street or Fleet Street, and what books are making a stir on the other side.  You take copies of American books that catch your fancy and pass them on to British reviewers, always at your quixotic task of trying to make each side appreciate the other’s humours.  For, though we promised not to give you away too personally, you are not only the sea captain but the man of letters, too, eminent in that field in your own right.

There must be some valid reason why so many good writers, and several who have some claim on the word “great,” have been bred of the sea.  Great writing comes from great stress of mind—­which even a journalist may suffer—­but it also requires strictness of seclusion and isolation.  Surely, on the small and decently regimented island of a ship a man’s mind must turn inward.  Surrounded by all that barren beauty of sky and sea, so lovely, and yet so meaningless to the mind, the doomed business of humanity must seem all the more precious and deserving of tenderness.  Perhaps that is what old George Herbert meant when he said, He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.