infliction. He walks the poop darting gloomy glances, as though he
wished to poison the sea, and snaps your head off savagely whenever
you happen to blunder within earshot. And these vagaries are the
harder to bear patiently, as becomes a man and an officer, because
no sailor is really good-tempered during the first few days of a
voyage. There are regrets, memories, the instinctive longing for
the departed idleness, the instinctive hate of all work. Besides,
things have a knack of going wrong at the start, especially in the
matter of irritating trifles. And there is the abiding thought of
a whole year of more or less hard life before one, because there
was hardly a southern-going voyage in the yesterday of the sea
which meant anything less than a twelvemonth. Yes; it needed a few
days after the taking of your departure for a ship's company to
shake down into their places, and for the soothing deep-water ship
routine to establish its beneficent sway.

It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your
ship's routine, which I have seen soothe--at least for a time--the
most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and
satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship's
life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea
horizon. It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the
majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also the
ship's routine.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall
away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily
as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and
vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort
of magical effect. They pass away, the days, the weeks, the