up in big ships may yet take a peculiar delight in what we should
both then have called a small craft. Probably the captain of the
big ship would not have understood very well. His answer would
have been a gruff, "Give me size," as I heard another man reply to
a remark praising the handiness of a small vessel. It was not a
love of the grandiose or the prestige attached to the command of
great tonnage, for he continued, with an air of disgust and
contempt, "Why, you get flung out of your bunk as likely as not in
any sort of heavy weather."

I don't know. I remember a few nights in my lifetime, and in a big
ship, too (as big as they made them then), when one did not get
flung out of one's bed simply because one never even attempted to
get in; one had been made too weary, too hopeless, to try. The
expedient of turning your bedding out on to a damp floor and lying
on it there was no earthly good, since you could not keep your
place or get a second's rest in that or any other position. But of
the delight of seeing a small craft run bravely amongst the great
seas there can be no question to him whose soul does not dwell
ashore. Thus I well remember a three days' run got out of a little
barque of 400 tons somewhere between the islands of St. Paul and
Amsterdam and Cape Otway on the Australian coast. It was a hard,
long gale, gray clouds and green sea, heavy weather undoubtedly,
but still what a sailor would call manageable. Under two lower
topsails and a reefed foresail the barque seemed to race with a
long, steady sea that did not becalm her in the troughs. The
solemn thundering combers caught her up from astern, passed her
with a fierce boiling up of foam level with the bulwarks, swept on
ahead with a swish and a roar: and the little vessel, dipping her
jib-boom into the tumbling froth, would go on running in a smooth,