had as full a worsted stocking if his mind had been
small enough to forget the difference betwixt the land and sea, the tide
of labor and the time of leisure.

To these local and tribal distinctions they added the lofty expansion of
sons of the sea. The habit of rising on the surge and falling into the
trough behind it enables a biped, as soon as he lands, to take things
that are flat with indifference. His head and legs have got into a state
of firm confidence in one another, and all these declare--with the rest
of the body performing as chorus gratis--that now they are come to a
smaller affair, upon which they intend to enjoy themselves. So that,
while strenuous and quick of movement--whenever they could not help
it--and sometimes even brisk of mind (if anybody strove to cheat them),
these men generally made no griefs beyond what they were born to.

Zebedee Tugwell was now their chief, and well deserved to be so. Every
community of common-sense demands to have somebody over it, and nobody
could have felt ashamed to be under Captain Tugwell. He had built with
his own hands, and bought--for no man's work is his own until he has
paid for as well as made it--the biggest and smartest of all the fleet,
that dandy-rigged smack, the Rosalie. He was proud of her, as he well
might be, and spent most of his time in thinking of her; but even she
was scarcely up to the size of his ideas. "Stiff in the joints," he now
said daily--"stiff in the joints is my complaint, and I never would have
believed it. But for all that, you shall see, my son, if the Lord should
spare you long enough, whether I don't beat her out and out with the
craft as have been in my mind this ten year."

But what man could be built to beat Zebedee himself, in an age like
this, when yachts and men take the prize by profundity of false keel?
Tugwell yearned for no hot speed in his friends, or his house, or his
wife, or his walk, or even his way of thinking. He had seen more harm
come from one hour's hurry than a hundred years of care could cure, and
the longer he lived the more loath he grew to disturb the air around
him.

"Admirable Nelson," he used to say--for his education had not been so
large as the parts allotted to receive it; "to my mind he is a brave
young man, with great understanding of his dooties. But he goeth too
fast, without clearing of his way. With a man like me 'longside of 'un,
he'd have brought they boats out of Bulong. See how I brings my