and star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest
mainland was perhaps a thousand miles away.

The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer
than the thoughts of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under
the stars. Thoughts as long as the world is round. Blazing bar
rooms in Callao--harbours over whose oily surfaces the sampans
slipped like water-beetles--the lights of Macao--the docks of
London. Scarcely ever a sea picture, pure and simple, for why
should an old seaman care to think about the sea, where life is all
into the fo'cs'le and out again, where one voyage blends and
jumbles with another, where after forty-five years of reefing
topsails you can't well remember off which ship it was Jack
Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who in the fo'cs'le
of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly, the fight,
and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosene lamp.

I doubt if Paddy Button could have told you the name of the first
ship he ever sailed in. If you had asked him, he would probably
have replied: "I disremimber; it was to the Baltic, and cruel cowld
weather, and I was say-sick till I near brought me boots up; and it
was 'O for ould Ireland!' I was cryin' all the time, an' the captin
dhrummin me back with a rope's end to the tune uv it--but the
name of the hooker--I disremimber--bad luck to her, whoever she
was!"

So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned
above him, and calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and
palmshadowed harbours, and the men and the women he had
known--such men and such women! The derelicts of the earth and