, sir!" is bawled from aloft. "Overhaul your clewlines!" shouts
the mate. "Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut leech! belay! Well the
lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the royals are set.

What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to that? He
would say, "The man that wrote that didn't learn his trade out of a book,
he has _been_ there!" But would this same captain be competent to sit in
judgment upon Shakespeare's seamanship--considering the changes in ships
and ship-talk that have necessarily taken place, unrecorded,
unremembered, and lost to history in the last three hundred years? It is
my conviction that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.
For instance--from _The Tempest_:

_Master_. Boatswain!

_Boatswain_. Here, master; what cheer?

_Master_. Good, speak to the mariners: fall to't, yarely, or we run
ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir!

(_Enter mariners_.)

_Boatswain_. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare,
yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle . . . Down
with the topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring her to try wi' the main
course . . . Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her two courses. Off to
sea again; lay her off.

That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now, for a change.

If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters say,
"Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and the imposing
stone into the hell-box; assemble the comps around the frisket and let
them jeff for takes and be quick about it," I should recognize a mistake
or two in the phrasing, and would know that the writer was only a printer
theoretically, not practically.

I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard life; I
know all the palaver of that business: I know all about discovery claims
and the subordinate claims; I know all about lodes, ledges, outcroppings,
dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels,
air-shafts, "horses," clay casings, granite casings; quartz mills and
their batteries; arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and
sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the
resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs;
and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for
something less robust to do, and find it. I know the _argot_ of the
quartz-mining and