lly served.
He will make mistakes; he will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings
precisely and exactly right; and the moment he departs, by even a shade,
from a common trade-form, the reader who has served that trade will know
the writer HASN'T. Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man
could learn how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and
free-masonries of ANY trade by careful reading and studying. But when
I got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the
interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a
student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and
perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation
and make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover. It
was a triumph for me. He was silent awhile, and I knew what was
happening--he was losing his temper. And I knew he would presently close
the session with the same old argument that was always his stay and
his support in time of need; the same old argument, the one I couldn't
answer, because I dasn't--the argument that I was an ass, and better
shut up. He delivered it, and I obeyed.

O dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago! And here am I,
old, forsaken, forlorn, and alone, arranging to get that argument out of
somebody again.

When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying that
he keeps company with other standard authors. Ealer always had several
high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the same ones over and
over again, and did not care to change to newer and fresher ones. He
played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play. So
did I. He had a notion that a flute would keep its health better if you
took it apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not
on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under
the breastboard. When the PENNSYLVANIA blew up and became a drifting
rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother
Henry among them), pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably
asleep and never knew what killed him; but Ealer escaped unhurt. He and
his pilot-house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and Ealer
sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane-deck and the
boiler-deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck,
on top of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of
scald and deadly steam. But n