Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/326

 MARK TWAIN

dangers and uncertainties which made sea life romantic have disappeared and carried the poetic element along with them. In our day the passengers never sing sea-songs on board a ship, and the band never plays them. Pathetic songs about the wan derer in strange lands far from home, once so popular and contributing such fire and color to the imagina tion by reason of the rarity of that kind of wanderer, have lost their charm and fallen silent, because every body is a wanderer in the far lands now, and the interest in that detail is dead. Nobody is worried about the wanderer; there are no perils of the sea for him, there are no uncertainties. He is safer in the ship than he would probably be at home, for there he is always liable to have to attend some friend s funeral and stand over the grave in the sleet, bareheaded and that means pneumonia for him, if he gets his deserts; and the uncertainties of his voyage are reduced to whether he will arrive on the other side in the appointed afternoon, or have to wait till morning.

The first ship I was ever in was a sailing-vessel. She was twenty-eight days going from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands. But the main reason for this particularly slow passage was that she got becalmed and lay in one spot fourteen days in the center of the Pacific two thousand miles from land. I hear no sea-songs in this present vessel, but I heard the entire lay-out in that one. There were a dozen young people they are pretty old now, I reckon and they used to group themselves on the stern, in the starlight or the moonlight, every eve-

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