One thing, though-make sure that your eyes are at least a good average. The vision test in the physical examination has held up many a man when he applied for his ableseaman's certificate or his mate's license. You will be put through distance-vision tests and color-vision tests as soon as you try to qualify for any post of even minor responsibility. You don't have to show up quite so well with your eyesight in order to get an engineering license as you do to get a deck license, but it's a matter you need to have a careful decision on if you're in any doubt, before you put in a year or two at sea and then find you can't advance because you're not good enough on distance and color vision.

IT

III

AT SEA

comes to this, then: If a man loves physical activity and enjoys rough comfort, if he is master enough of himself so that he does not yield to every casual temptation to dissipate, if he doesn't think he is a world's wonder and on the way to great recognitions, the life at sea pays about as well as the life ashore in both money and satisfactions. If he has an inborn hankering after the sea from inherited tendency, or boyhood prowling about ships in port, or much reading, there is no use talking to him, anyway. But in the way that most sailors discourage a novice, if they can, I have felt that I should point out most the disadvantages. Once a lad throws in his lot with them in spite of all they can do to prevent it, they turn to, men and officers, to make a seaman of him. No fellow should go to sea for a long time or a short one unless he feels an enthusiasm for seacraft. He will have an unhappy time

of it, and it is right he should, if he uses a ship just for the convenience of his wayward and wayfaring instincts. Men who are giving their lives to a craft have no time and no patience for wastrels or for better men who are going through a passing wastrel phase of their lives. Joseph Conrad says something about the finest old type of seamen that every man seeking an opportunity in merchantships does well to ponder. Singleton, the old seaman, stands, in the dead of night, looking down into the forecastle of the Narcissus, during her last night in port, while all the rest of the crew are asleep.

The men who could understand his silence were gone -those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and faithful. Wellmeaning people had tried to represent those men as whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men-but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived

inarticulate and indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home-and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea. Their successors are the grown-up children of a discontented earth. They are less naughty, but less innocent; less profane, but perhaps also less believing; and if they have learned how to speak they have also learned how to whine. But the others were strong and mute; they were effaced, bowed, and enduring, like stone caryatides that hold up in the night the lighted halls of a resplendent and glorious edifice. They are gone now-and it does not matter. The sea and the earth are unfaithful to their children: a truth, a faith, a generation of men goes-and is forgotten, and it does not matter! Except, perhaps, to the few of those who believed the truth, confessed the faith-or loved the men.

The job is to be like those men in the main. Better conditions at sea than they had will make easier living out of the present-day sailors and it should therefore make more willing workers and more capable workers. See that the easier living does that instead of making merely a man who takes everything easier. Andrew Furuseth, the president of the Seamen's Union in the United States, wrote out a statement once that might be called "The Whole Duty of a Seaman":

The man who expects to be known as an able seaman on a steamship must know the use of rigging-screws, fids,

marline-spikes, serving-mallets, the palm and needle, calking tools, the mixing of paints and colors, how to obtain strong leverages with bars, ropes, tackles, how to brace with wedges and shores, besides knowing the various knots and splices, and to worm, parcel, serve, and seize, with rope and wire, and must be able to hold up his end of a job when it comes to climbing and working in places where both armhold and foothold are difficult. He must know the lead-line, not only its marks, but how to use it, to get correct soundings when the ship is in close quarters, the night dark, and the sea heavy, whether he stands in a smother of sea on a low freighter or far up the side of an immense liner. The compass, of course, is a familiar object to him, but he must know how to use it, how to steer the ship under all conditions, what to expect and how to meet it when he is steering across a current as well as with it or against it, through the swift rush of a narrows, passing at close quarters in and out of the suction of another heavy ship under speed, with the wind light or strong from any direction, heading into a heavy sea, taking it on either bow or quarter or abeam, under check or full speed, rolling and pitching heavily, or running before it.

He must have, besides, all the skill required in life-boat work, and should know about stowage as well as having a thorough handiness with cargo-booms. But the thoroughness of Mr. Furuseth's description shows the fervor and the pride and the readiness in each one of his tasks that we need more than anything else at sea. It isn't necessary to