From such reflections I was glad to make any escape on board that Bremen
Diana. There apparently no whisper of the world's iniquities had ever
penetrated. And yet she lived upon the wide sea: and the sea tragic
and comic, the sea with its horrors and its peculiar scandals, the sea
peopled by men and ruled by iron necessity is indubitably a part of the
world. But that patriarchal old tub, like some saintly retreat, echoed
nothing of it. She was world proof. Her venerable innocence apparently
had put a restraint on the roaring lusts of the sea. And yet I have
known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An
elemental force is ruthlessly frank. It may, of course, have been
Hermann's skilful seamanship, but to me it looked as if the allied
oceans had refrained from smashing these high bulwarks, unshipping
the lumpy rudder, frightening the children, and generally opening this
family's eyes out of sheer reticence. It looked like reticence. The
ruthless disclosure was in the end left for a man to make; a man strong
and elemental enough and driven to unveil some secrets of the sea by the
power of a simple and elemental desire.

This, however, occurred much later, and meantime I took sanctuary in
that serene old ship early every evening. The only person on board that
seemed to be in trouble was little Lena, and in due course I perceived
that the health of the rag-doll was more than delicate. This object led
a sort of "in extremis" existence in a wooden box placed against the
starboard mooring-bitts, tended and nursed with the greatest sympathy
and care by all the children, who greatly enjoyed pulling long faces and
moving with hushed footsteps. Only the baby--Nicholas--looked on with a
cold, ruffianly leer, as if he had belonged to another tribe altogether.
Lena perpetually sorrowed over the box, and all of them were in deadly
earnest. It was wonderful the way these children would work up their