obs, by night with thoughts of home.
In port he is busy like everybody else; but at sea, in fine weather,
his greatest grievance is the short hours "off" and "on." Our steamer
carries but two deck officers, and these two keep alternate "watch and
watch" throughout the twenty-four hours. This means that his watch
below is all sleep. The Chief Officer comes off at eight p.m., say,
washes himself, smokes a pipe, and "turns in." At eleven-forty-five
the sailor coming on watch at the wheel calls him, and he "turns out."
Nothing can equal the ghastly expression on the faces of men who have
been torn from their sleep at an unnaturally premature hour. They move
along the iron decks like ghosts, peering into one's face like
disembodied spirits seeking their corporeal correlatives, and avoiding
stanchions, chains, and other pitfalls in an uncanny fashion. In the
meantime, the Second Officer drifts "aft" to his bunk for another
four-hour sleep. And so on, day after day, for weeks.

IV

I have this, at any rate, to say of sea-life: a man is pre-eminently
conscious of a Soul. I feel, remembering the blithe positivism of my
early note, that I am here scarcely consistent. As I stood by the rail
this morning at four o'clock--the icy fingers of the wind ruffled my
hair so that the roots tingled deliciously, and a low, greenish
cloud-bank, which was Ireland, lay nebulously against our port bow--I
felt a change take place. It was almost physical, organic. The dawn
grew whiter, and the rose-pink banners of the coming sun reached out
across the grey wastes of the St. George's Channel. I am loth to use
the trite metaphor of "a spiritual dawn." By a strange twist of
things, my barest hint of a soul within me, that is to say, the
faintest glimmer of the ever-increasing purpose of my being--the
moment it showed through, the outer world, including my own self, had
always greeted it with inextinguishable laughter. Perhaps because the
purpose was always so very immature, so very uncertain. I wanted--I
hardly knew what. My ideas of morality were so terrible that I left it
alone, on one side, for a time, and charged full tilt at art. I
shouted that I thought music a disease, and musicians crushed me. I
did not mean that; but I could get no nearer to what I did mean in
any other phrase. I told hard, practical business men that they were
dreamers and visionaries; and they are still dreaming.

But the Angel of the Spirit does not move in any