“Come, now, George, don’t improvise.
It looks too egotistical. It will provoke remark.
Just stick to ‘Coronation,’ like the others.
It is a good tune—you can’t improve
it any, just off-hand, in this way.”
“Why, I’m not trying to improve it—and
I am singing like the others —just as it
is in the notes.”
And he honestly thought he was, too; and so he had
no one to blame but himself when his voice caught
on the center occasionally and gave him the lockjaw.
There were those among the unregenerated who attributed
the unceasing head-winds to our distressing choir-music.
There were those who said openly that it was taking
chances enough to have such ghastly music going on,
even when it was at its best; and that to exaggerate
the crime by letting George help was simply flying
in the face of Providence. These said that the
choir would keep up their lacerating attempts at melody
until they would bring down a storm some day that would
sink the ship.
There were even grumblers at the prayers. The
executive officer said the pilgrims had no charity:
“There they are, down there every night at eight
bells, praying for fair winds—when they
know as well as I do that this is the only ship going
east this time of the year, but there’s a thousand
coming west—what’s a fair wind for
us is a head wind to them—the Almighty’s
blowing a fair wind for a thousand vessels, and this
tribe wants him to turn it clear around so as to accommodate
one—and she a steamship at that! It
ain’t good sense, it ain’t good reason,
it ain’t good Christianity, it ain’t common
human charity. Avast with such nonsense!”
Taking it “by and large,” as the sailors
say, we had a pleasant ten days’ run from New
York to the Azores islands—not a fast run,
for the distance is only twenty-four hundred miles,
but a right pleasant one in the main. True, we
had head winds all the time, and several stormy experiences
which sent fifty percent of the passengers to bed sick
and made the ship look dismal and deserted—stormy
experiences that all will remember who weathered them
on the tumbling deck and caught the vast sheets of
spray that every now and then sprang high in air from
the weather bow and swept the ship like a thunder-shower;
but for the most part we had balmy summer weather
and nights that were even finer than the days.
We had the phenomenon of a full moon located just
in the same spot in the heavens at the same hour every
night. The reason of this singular conduct on
the part of the moon did not occur to us at first,
but it did afterward when we reflected that we were
gaining about twenty minutes every day because we
were going east so fast—we gained just about
enough every day to keep along with the moon.
It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had
left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in
the same place and remained always the same.
