Being love this feeling is naturally naive and imaginative.  It has also in it that strain of fantasy that is so often, nay almost invariably, to be found in the temperament of a true seaman.  But I repeat that I claim no particular morality for seamen.  I will admit without difficulty that I have found amongst them the usual defects of mankind, characters not quite straight, uncertain tempers, vacillating wills, capriciousness, small meannesses; all this coming out mostly on the contact with the shore; and all rather naive, peculiar, a little fantastic.  I have even had a downright thief in my experience.  One.

This is indeed a minute proportion, but it might have been my luck; and since I am writing in eulogy of seamen I feel irresistibly tempted to talk about this unique specimen; not indeed to offer him as an example of morality, but to bring out certain characteristics and set out a certain point of view.  He was a large, strong man with a guileless countenance, not very communicative with his shipmates, but when drawn into any sort of conversation displaying a very painstaking earnestness.  He was fair and candid-eyed, of a very satisfactory smartness, and, from the officer-of-the-watch point of view,—­altogether dependable.  Then, suddenly, he went and stole.  And he didn’t go away from his honourable kind to do that thing to somebody on shore; he stole right there on the spot, in proximity to his shipmates, on board his own ship, with complete disregard for old Brown, our night watchman (whose fame for trustworthiness was utterly blasted for the rest of the voyage) and in such a way as to bring the profoundest possible trouble to all the blameless souls animating that ship.  He stole eleven golden sovereigns, and a gold pocket chronometer and chain.  I am really in doubt whether the crime should not be entered under the category of sacrilege rather than theft.  Those things belonged to the captain!  There was certainly something in the nature of the violation of a sanctuary, and of a particularly impudent kind, too, because he got his plunder out of the captain’s state-room while the captain was asleep there.  But look, now, at the fantasy of the man!  After going through the pockets of the clothes, he did not hasten to retreat.  No.  He went deliberately into the saloon and removed from the sideboard two big heavy, silver-plated lamps, which he carried to the fore-end of the ship and stood symmetrically on the knight-heads.  This, I must explain, means that he took them away as far as possible from the place where they belonged.  These were the deeds of darkness.  In the morning the bo’sun came along dragging after him a hose to wash the foc’sle head, and, beholding the shiny cabin lamps, resplendent in the morning light, one on each side of the bowsprit, he was paralysed with awe.  He dropped the nozzle from his nerveless hands—­and such hands, too!  I happened along, and he said to me in a distracted whisper:  “Look at that, sir, look.”  “Take them back aft at once yourself,” I said, very amazed, too.  As we approached the quarterdeck we perceived the steward, a prey to a sort of sacred horror, holding up before us the captain’s trousers.