thrusting holes through it. Smash! There goes your topmast stay, and
the topmast reels over drunkenly above you. There is a ripping and
crunching. If it continues, your starboard shrouds will be torn out.
Grab a rope--any rope--and take a turn around a pile. But the free end
of the rope is too short. You can't make it fast, and you hold on and
wildly yell for your one companion to get a turn with another and longer
rope. Hold on! You hold on till you are purple in the face, till it
seems your arms are dragging out of their sockets, till the blood bursts
from the ends of your fingers. But you hold, and your partner gets the
longer rope and makes it fast. You straighten up and look at your hands.
They are ruined. You can scarcely relax the crooks of the fingers. The
pain is sickening. But there is no time. The skiff, which is always
perverse, is pounding against the barnacles on the piles which threaten
to scrape its gunwale off. It's drop the peak! Down jib! Then you run
lines, and pull and haul and heave, and exchange unpleasant remarks with
the bridge-tender who is always willing to meet you more than half way in
such repartee. And finally, at the end of an hour, with aching back,
sweat-soaked shirt, and slaughtered hands, you are through and swinging
along on the placid, beneficent tide between narrow banks where the
cattle stand knee-deep and gaze wonderingly at you. Excitement! Work!
Can you beat it in a calm day on the deep sea?

I've tried it both ways. I remember labouring in a fourteen days' gale
off the coast of New Zealand. We were a tramp collier, rusty and
battered, with six thousand tons of coal in our hold. Life lines were
stretched fore and aft; and on our weather side, attached to smokestack
guys and rigging, were huge rope-nettings, hung there for the purpose of
breaking the force of the seas and so saving our mess-room doors. But
the doors were smashed and the mess-rooms washed out just the same. And
yet, out of it all, arose but the one feeling, namely, of monotony.