Doctor, show him a flare."
It was a smack, and her lights had gone wrong somehow; she was moving
but slowly, and she let the Mission vessel off with a hole in the mizen.
The scrimmage would have meant death had any breeze been blowing; but
the men took it coolly after the one dread minute of anxiety was over.
If we were all able to imagine our own deaths as possible--to _really_
imagine it, I mean--then one snowy night on the banks would drive any
man mad; no brain could stand it. We all know we shall die, but none of
us seem to believe it, or else no one would ever go to sea a second time
in winter. A steady opiate is at work in each man's being--blurring his
vision of extinction, and thus our seamen go through a certain
performance a dozen times over in a winter, and this performance is much
like that of a blindfold man driving a Hansom cab from Cornhill to
Marble Arch on a Saturday evening during a November fog.
The man who shoved the cork fender over the side had received a graze
which sent a big flap of skin over his eye and blinded him with blood.
He laughed when Lewis dressed him, and said, "That was near enough for
most people, sir. I've seen two or three like that in a night."
"Well, I like to see you laugh, but I thought all was over when I saw he
was going to give us the stem."
"So did I, sir; but fishermen has to git used to being drowned."
As Lennard and the doctor sat filling the crew's cabin with billows of
smoke, the former said--"There's a kind of frolicsome humour about these
men that truly pleases me.
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