All this is your personal gift: it is no necessary part of the
master's equipment to be so gracefully conversable. Of the graver
side of the sea captain's life, though you say little, we see it
unconsciously written in your bearing. Some of us, who know just a
little about it, can guess something of its burdens, its vigils, and
its courages. There is something significant in the obscure instinct
that some of your friends have to seize what opportunity they can of
seeing you in your own quarters when you are in port. For though a
ship in dock is a ship fettered and broken of much of her life and
meaning, yet in the captain's cabin the landsman feels something of
that fine, faithful, and rigorous way of life. It is a hard life, he
knows; a life of stringent seriousness, of heavy responsibilities:
and yet it is a life for which we are fool enough to speak the
fool's word of envy. It is a life spared the million frittering
interruptions and cheerful distractions that devil the journalist;
it is a life cut down to the essentials of discipline, simplicity,
and service; a life where you must, at necessity, be not merely
navigator but magistrate, employer, and priest. Birth, death, and
all the troubles that lie between, fall under your sway, and must
find you unperturbed. But, when you go out of that snug cabin for
your turn of duty, at any rate you have the dark happiness of
knowing that you go to a struggle worthy your powers, the struggle
with that old, immortal, unconquerable, and yet daily conquered
enemy, the Sea.
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