What Is Man? and Other Essays eBook

who has served that trade will know the writer hasn’t.  Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could learn how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-masonries of any trade by careful reading and studying.  But when I got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn’t teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover.  It was a triumph for me.  He was silent awhile, and I knew what was happening—­he was losing his temper.  And I knew he would presently close the session with the same old argument that was always his stay and his support in time of need; the same old argument, the one I couldn’t answer, because I dasn’t—­the argument that I was an ass, and better shut up.  He delivered it, and I obeyed.

O dear, how long ago it was—­how pathetically long ago!  And here am I, old, forsaken, forlorn, and alone, arranging to get that argument out of somebody again.

When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying that he keeps company with other standard authors.  Ealer always had several high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the same ones over and over again, and did not care to change to newer and fresher ones.  He played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play.  So did I.

He had a notion that a flute would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under the breastboard.  When the Pennsylvania blew up and became a drifting rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother Henry among them), pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably asleep and never knew what killed him; but Ealer escaped unhurt.  He and his pilot-house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and Ealer sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane-deck and the boiler-deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scald and deadly steam.  But not for long.  He did not lose his head—­long familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all emergencies.  He held his coat-lapels to his nose with one hand, to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till he found the joints of his flute, then he took measures to save himself alive, and was successful.  I was not on board.  I had been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain Klinenfelter.  The reason—­however, I have told all about it in the book called old times on the Mississippi, and it isn’t important, anyway, it is so long ago.

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