oot from some formidable quantity, and bringing
it to the surface exhausted and far from certain as to the ultimate
utility of their discoveries. They have come from the far ends of the
sea-lanes, these men, from Niger River ports and the coast towns of
China, from lordly liners and humble tramps, from the frozen fjords
of Aelborg and the crowded tideways of the Hooghley. They are
extraordinarily unprepossessing, most of them, for the time was not
yet when sea-going was considered, save as a last resource, like
selling newspapers or going to America. These men were mostly
artisans, thick-fingered mechanics who had gone to sea, driven by some
obscure urge or prosaic economic necessity, and the sea had changed
them, as it changes everything, fashioning in them a blunt work-a-day
fatalism and a strong, coarse-fibred character admirably adapted to
their way of life. But that way is far from schools and colleges.
They lack that subtle academical atmosphere so essential to genuine
culture. They have none of them what the educated classes call an
examination brain. They resemble a pack of sheep-dogs in a parlour.
They accept with pathetic fidelity the dogmas of their text-books, and
they submit humbly to incarceration while their heads are loaded down
with formulas and theories, most of which they jettison with relief
when they feel the first faint lift of the vessel to the ocean swell
outside the breakwater.

But it should on no account be assumed from the above truthful
estimate of their mentality that these men are to be dismissed as mere
factory hands or negligible land-failures. The sea has her own way of
making men, and informs them, as the years and miles go by, with a
species of differential intuition, a flexible mental mechanism which
calibrates and registers with astonishing accuracy and speed. They
become profound judges of human character within the rough walls of
their experience, and for women they betray a highly specialized
esteem....

For all that, as they sit here in their extremely respectable blue
serge suits, which still show the sharp creases where they were laid
away in unskillful folds during the voyage, they give one an
impression of lugubrious failure. It must be confessed that simple as
the examinations are they are beyond the range of many of us. The
habits of study are not easily retained during the long stretches of
watch-keeping intermitted with hilarious trips ashore. We find a great
difficul