Tired as I was,--exhausted, in fact,--I was prevented from sleeping
by the pain in my knee. It was all I could do to keep from
groaning aloud. At home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my
anguish; but this new and elemental environment seemed to call for
a savage repression. Like the savage, the attitude of these men
was stoical in great things, childish in little things. I
remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the
hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did
not even murmur or change the expression on his face. Yet I have
seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous
passion over a trifle.

He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with
another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to
swim. He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was
born. The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow
with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the
seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it
could not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim
as birds were compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.

For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table
or lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two
antagonists. But they were supremely interested, for every little
while they ardently took sides, and sometimes all were talking at
once, till their voices surged back and forth in waves of sound
like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space. Childish and
immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was
still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very