Do
you like a storm?"
"Well, sir, smooth sea-sailing is no great pleasure. I would rather see
clouds of spray driving past swelling sails, than feel my way through a
nasty fog. Give me a sea as high as a masthead, compact as a wall, and
charging with the level swiftness of a horse regiment, and I would
rather take a ship through it, than make her cut her way through a
thick, black fog, as if she was a knife. In a storm you see what you are
doing, and where you are going, but you hev to steal and creep and sneak
through a fog, and never know what trap or hole may be ahead of you. I
know the sea in all her ways and moods, sir. Some of them are rather
trying. But my home and my business is on her, and in her worst temper
she suits me better than any four-walled room, where I would feel like a
stormy petrel shut up in a cage. The sea and I are kin. I often feel as
if I had tides in my blood that flow and ebb with her tides."
"I would not gainsay you, Captain. Every man's blood runs as he feels.
You were a different man and a grander man when you were guiding the
yacht through the storm than you are sitting here beside me eating and
drinking.
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