Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/355

Rh "And then you know," said the Sea Lady very gravely, "one's hair!"

"Of course," said Melville."Why!—you can never get it dry!"

"That's precisely it," said she.

My cousin Melville had a new light on an old topic. "And that's why—in the old time?"

"Exactly!" she cried, "exactly! Before there were so many Excursionists and sailors and Low People about, one came out, one sat and brushed it in the sun. And then of course it really was possible to do it up. But now"

She made a petulant gesture and looked gravely at Melville, biting her lip the while. My cousin made a sympathetic noise. "The horrid modern spirit," he said—almost automatically

But though fiction and fashion appear to be so regrettably dominant in the nourishment of the mer-mind, it must not be supposed that the most serious side of our reading never reaches the bottom of the sea. There was, for example, a case quite recently, the Sea Lady said, of the captain of a sailing ship whose mind had become unhinged by the huckstering uproar of the Times and Daily Mail, and who had not only bought a second-hand copy of the Times reprint of the "Encyclopædia Britannica," but also that dense collection of literary snacks and samples, that All-Literature Sausage which has been compressed under the weighty editing of Doctor Richard Garnett. It has long been notorious that even the greatest minds of the past were far too copious and confusing in their—as the word goes—