one crew to another without bitterness, without animosity, with the
indulgence of mutual dependence, and with the feeling of close
association in the exercise of her perfections and in the danger of
her defects.

This feeling explains men's pride in ships. "Ships are all right,"
as my middle-aged, respectable quartermaster said with much
conviction and some irony; but they are not exactly what men make
them. They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister
to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our
skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.
Which is the more flattering exaction it is hard to say; but there
is the fact that in listening for upwards of twenty years to the
sea-talk that goes on afloat and ashore I have never detected the
true note of animosity. I won't deny that at sea, sometimes, the
note of profanity was audible enough in those chiding
interpellations a wet, cold, weary seaman addresses to his ship,
and in moments of exasperation is disposed to extend to all ships
that ever were launched--to the whole everlastingly exacting brood
that swims in deep waters. And I have heard curses launched at the
unstable element itself, whose fascination, outlasting the
accumulated experience of ages, had captured him as it had captured
the generations of his forebears.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on
shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it
had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been
friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human
restlessness, and playing the part of dangerous abettor of world-
wide ambitions. Faithful to no race after the manner of the kindly