“Come, belay there!  I have read this kind of rot all my life in poetry and tales and such-like rubbage.  Pity for the poor mariner! sympathy for the poor mariner!  All right enough, but not in the way the poetry puts it.  Pity for the mariner’s wife! all right again, but not in the way the poetry puts it.  Look-a here! whose life’s the safest in the whole world The poor mariner’s.  You look at the statistics, you’ll see.  So don’t you fool away any sympathy on the poor mariner’s dangers and privations and sufferings.  Leave that to the poetry muffs.  Now you look at the other side a minute.  Here is Captain Brace, forty years old, been at sea thirty.  On his way now to take command of his ship and sail south from Bermuda.  Next week he’ll be under way; easy times; comfortable quarters; passengers, sociable company; just enough to do to keep his mind healthy and not tire him; king over his ship, boss of everything and everybody; thirty years’ safety to learn him that his profession ain’t a dangerous one.  Now you look back at his home.  His wife’s a feeble woman; she’s a stranger in New York; shut up in blazing hot or freezing cold lodgings, according to the season; don’t know anybody hardly; no company but her lonesomeness and her thoughts; husband gone six months at a time.  She has borne eight children; five of them she has buried without her husband ever setting eyes on them.  She watches them all the long nights till they died—­he comfortable on the sea; she followed them to the grave she heard the clods fall that broke her heart he comfortable on the sea; she mourned at home, weeks and weeks, missing them every day and every hour —­he cheerful at sea, knowing nothing about it.  Now look at it a minute —­turn it over in your mind and size it:  five children born, she among strangers, and him not by to hearten her; buried, and him not by to comfort her; think of that!  Sympathy for the poor mariner’s perils is rot; give it to his wife’s hard lines, where it belongs!  Poetry makes out that all the wife worries about is the dangers her husband’s running.  She’s got substantialer things to worry over, I tell you.  Poetry’s always pitying the poor mariner on account of his perils at sea; better a blamed sight pity him for the nights he can’t sleep for thinking of how he had to leave his wife in her very birth pains, lonesome and friendless, in the thick of disease and trouble and death.  If there’s one thing that can make me madder than another, it’s this sappy, damned maritime poetry!”

Captain Brace was a patient, gentle, seldom speaking man, with a pathetic something in his bronzed face that had been a mystery up to this time, but stood interpreted now since we had heard his story.  He had voyaged eighteen times to the Mediterranean, seven times to India, once to the arctic pole in a discovery-ship, and “between times” had visited all the remote seas and ocean corners of the globe.  But he said that twelve years ago, on account of his family, he “settled down,” and ever since then had ceased to roam.  And what do you suppose was this simple-hearted, lifelong wanderer’s idea of settling down and ceasing to roam?  Why, the making of two five-month voyages a year between Surinam and Boston for sugar and molasses!