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At length Martin became convinced that all hope of returning home was gone. He went quietly below, threw himself into one of the sailor's berths, turned his face to the wall, and wept long and bitterly. Time reconciles a man to almost anything.
A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing. His offing hardly deserves the name of horizon. To hear him you might think something of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in the centre of it. As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady, so swift, is the subsidence at your descent. The further sea lies away, hill folds down behind hill.
He writhed and twisted like a limbed snake, and bit and tore with teeth and hands. But the odds were hopelessly against him; a rope in a sailor's practised hands wound about his body, and he lay, a panting prisoner, across his own threshold. A few others of the villagers were seized, the rest of the roofs were fired, and the adventurers marched back to the river. No spoil was taken.
In the sailor's story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this opportunity had thrust upon him. What was interesting was that he would boast of it openly. He used to say: "People think I make a lot of money in this schooner of mine. But that is nothing. I don't care for that.
These additional things, the littles that yet meant so much, bred in him a hatred of the service so implacable that nothing less drastic than the warrant and the hanger could cope with or subdue it. Eradicated it never was. The keynote to the sailor's treatment in the Navy may be said to have been profane abuse. Officers of all ranks kept the Recording Angel fearfully busy.
He it is that set us free. Then the King's son cast off the sailor's cloak, and stood there far finer and grander than all the rest; and so the old King made them put Ritter Red to death. And now there was real right down joy in the palace; each took his own bride, and there just was a wedding! Why, it was heard of and talked about over twelve kings' realms.
"I suspect that Mrs Murray considers it a very cruel kindness," observed the admiral; "but every sailor's wife must be prepared to be parted from her husband, and to make the most of him when he is on shore."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "it was enough to make a wooden Indian laugh. The old jay with the barnacles telling us about the advantages of a sailor's life. And Steve's face! Ho! ho!" His mother snorted disgust. "If you had brains," she declared, "you would have understood what he meant by saying that the sea was the place to learn what to unlearn. He was hitting at you.
Besides, what would become of the British navy, if you listened to all the fine-spun arguments of landsmen? And if these stalwart blue-water Britishers could have read what Thomas Jefferson was writing at this very time, they would have classed him with the armchair critics who had no proper conception of a sailor's duty.
This complexion, the 'hitch' in the bandage, and the 'sailor's knot, with which the bonnet-ribbon is tied, point to a seaman. His companionship with the deceased, a gay, but not an abject young girl, designates him as above the grade of the common sailor. Here the well written and urgent communications to the journals are much in the way of corroboration.
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