not
compelled to choose. Many another is not so well off. Like little boys
who are sent to school, they learn what they learn from pretty much the
same motive. Sometimes they turn out good and gallant men; but not
often does it reform a man who is unfit for the shore to dispatch him
to sea. If there are any vices he does not carry with him, they are
commonly to be had dog- and dirt-cheap at the first port his ship
makes.

Then, last of all, there is a large and increasing class who _get_ to
sea. They fall into the calling, they cannot tell how; they continue in
it, they cannot tell why. Some have friends who would rescue them, if
they could; others have no friend, no home, no nationality even, the
pariahs of the sea, sullen, stupid, and broken-down, burnt-out shells
of men, which the belaying-pin of some brutal or passionate mate
crushes into sudden collapse, or which the hospital duly consigns to
the potter's field.

There is a popular idea of the sailor, which, beginning at the lowest
note of the gamut, with the theatrical and cheap-novelist mariner, runs
up its do-re-mi with authors, preachers, public speakers, reformers,
and legislators, but always in the wrong key. There is no use in making
up an ideal of any class; but if you must have one, let it be of an
extinct class. It does not much harm to construct horrible
plesiosaurians from the petrified scales we dig out of a coal-mine or
chalk-pit; but when it comes to idealizing the sea-serpent, who winters
at the Cape Verds and summers at Nahant, it is a serious matter. For
the love of Agassiz, give us true dimensions or none.

So, too, fancy Greeks and Romans may be ever preferable to the true
Aristophanic or Juvenalian article,--imaginary Cavaliers or Puritans
not at all hard to swallow,--but ideal sailors, why in the world must
we bear them, when we can get the originals so cheaply? When the
American "Beggar's Opera" was put upon the stage, "Mose" stepped
forward, the very impersonation of the Bowery. If it was low, it was at
least true, a social fact. But the stage sailor is not as near
probability as even the stage ship or the theatrical ocean. He is a
relic of the past,--a monstrous compound out of the imperfect gleanings
of the Wapping dramatists of the last century. Yet all those who deal
with this character of the sailor begin upon the same false notion. In
their eyes the seaman is a good-natured, unsophisticated, frank,
easy-going creature, perfectly r