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With the same reverential feeling we examined the seamen the young gentleman in the bows of the boat the handsome young officers of marines we met sauntering in the town next day the Scotch surgeon who boarded us as we weighed anchor every man, down to the broken-nosed mariner who was drunk in a wine-house, and had "Caledonia" written on his hat.
A dozen ordinary skippers sailed past before a famous fisherman at length came in. Everybody knew him a dog, a high-liner, truly a master mariner. A murmur went up. "There's the boy," said Tommie Clancy. "I mind last summer when he came into Souris just such a day as this, but with more wind stirring.
"It looks as if the city would all go," he said; and the mariner, thinking him afraid, summoned his oarsmen, and to please him made haste, as he too well might, for the light of the burning projected over the wall, and, flung back from the cloud overhead far as the eye could penetrate, illuminated the harbor as it did the streets, bringing the ships to view, their crews on deck, and Galata, wall, housetops and tower, crowded with people awestruck by the immensity of the calamity.
The custom of the mariner in coming to this coast from beyond the seas is to run his ship so that on arrival, if after dark, he shall see the proper coast-light in fair weather, and, if in thick weather, that he shall hear fog-signal, and, taking that as a point of departure, to feel his way from the coast-light to the harbor-light, or from the fog-signal on the coast to the fog-signal in the harbor, and thence to his anchorage or his wharf.
From quantitative analysis how shall he turn again to "the rime of the ancient mariner," and "the moving moon" that "went up the sky, and nowhere did abide"? From his window he gazes across the sands to the mightily troubled ocean: "What is the storm to me any more!" he cries; "it is but the clashing of countless water-drops!"
The mariner observes the progress he makes only by the way in which objects on the coast fade away into the distance and apparently decrease in size. In the same way a man becomes conscious that he is advancing in years when he finds that people older than himself begin to seem young to him.
At night I prouided a gift, or present, and sent one marchant and a mariner with it to the king, to certifie him of our want of victuals, by reason whereof we could not stay long: for in deed we searched our ship, and the most part of our beere was leaked out of all our barrels. The 22 day we tooke three ounces and a halfe.
"What's all this, you two?" demanded Tilda, springing down the cabin steps and hurling herself between them. "Hullo! Come in!" answered Mr. Mortimer genially. "This? Well, I hope it is an intellectual treat. I have always looked upon Mrs. Mortimer's Desdemona as such, even at rehearsal." "Day after day, day after day We stuck." COLERIDGE, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
In ages of endeavor the ocean had made chambers in the rock and cut passages to the top, through which, at every surge of the pounding waves, the water rushed and rose high in the air. Iron-bound, the mariner calls this coast, and the word makes one see the powerful, severe mold of it.
It seemed hopeless to think about getting down that creek until the wind stopped, and one doubts if the wind ever does stop in that country. But there was no good sitting there like a shipwrecked mariner, nursing sores and misfortunes; presently one would begin to feel sorry for oneself that last resort of incompetence. And the bitter wind is a great stimulus. It will not permit inaction.
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