James B. Connolly

“ We were in that gale, this same vessel, and no particular praise to me or the crew—and a fine crew, too—that ourselves and vessel came out of it safe. And how was that? I'll tell you.
"A wicked night it was, and we trying to buck our way off the Bank. Wind? Lord knows, maybe ninety or a hundred miles an hour 'twas blowing. Frightful—yes. Under a two-reefed fores'l we were, and that was plenty. Black as hell, and seas to your masthead. All around us we could hear the calls of men in peril, with their voices, when sometimes they'd rise above the wind, like the cries of ghosts in the night. ”

“ We know people that would as soon smell a cabbage as a rose, who see no purple in a summer sunset in the hills, who know no difference between the booming of a negro boy on a bass drum and the touch of a heaven-born musician on the violin. ”

“ If only now and then they wouldn't consider all but their own cold-blooded kind deficient in intellect and would try to explain, instead of destroy, the faith in so many things that make for the betterment of mankind. These men who dabble in laboratories should really follow behind. There is where they might become useful. A hundred things we might quote, but take the one thing that all the world is interested in now. Take wireless telegraphy. Now, before the days of wireless telegraphy, you had your scientists, didn't you? ”

“ The last thing I saw as I sank down the companionway was Eb ready to cast over his line as he stood by the rail. Well, I drew a mug of coffee from the pot on the stove. It was wonderfully quiet below as well as on deck. Not a sound from out of the bunks, where a dozen men were sleeping. You know how, among ten or twelve healthy men, there will always be two or three, at least, to turn and toss, especially if they've eaten a hearty supper; but that night they were all breathing like infants. ”

“ Yet Marconi is only proving in the physical world what that saintly old woman is doing continually in the spiritual world. All her life she has lived in God. Why can't she, towards the end of it, have the eyes that see, the ears that hear, the divinations that us ordinary fleshly people never have. ”

“ Why not? The passenger looked above and about. A notable night, not alone for the overpowering beauty—beautiful nights are not rare at sea—but for the amazing quiet of sea and sky. The passenger's thoughts came back to that other night of the Didymus.
Wasn't it possible that a knife was lying around deck, after all? And with it couldn't Eb have cut the line and let it slip overboard then? If not that, what sort of a creature—what manner of a countenance did it bear that the strong man was stricken dead at sight of it? ”

“ Now there will always be the so-called scientists, and useful people they'll be, too, and yet more useful if they weren't so fond of overrating their mission, which is to deal mostly with facts, so called, of the physical world—things you can measure with a bushel-basket or a tape, or weigh on a pair of platform scales. ”

“ Well, suppose, again, that to-day a fine old lady, who has lived a full life, loved and married and borne her brood of children, and her children after her borne children, too, and some have lived and some have died—she has christened her quick and waked her dead, her own and her children's children—she's had great joys in her life, but mostly she's had great sorrows, and from out of her life has come much thought. ”

“ And again, for your people who believe nothing until it is proved to them, and proved according to their own rule; for by proof they mean something they can understand, something that's within their grasp, never for a moment alive to the fact that their grasp on the great things may be pitiably weak. ”

“ And so it came to the night that Eb Stone came on deck, saying he couldn't sleep, and guessed he'd fish for a while. There was nobody else awake at the time but me. I was on watch, and tending to my line too, as a man on watch quite often does, when he's not overtired and the night is fine. Having to stay awake anyway, a man might as well be fishing and adding to his store as be doing nothing. This night, when Eb came up, I thought it would be a good chance to go below and get a mug of coffee. ”

“ A quiet sea it was, too, the same as it is to-night, smooth as the oilcloth on this cabin floor. A wonderful night altogether, I couldn't help remarking to Eb as I was about to drop below.
"'Yes,' said Eb—to the rail he was then and ready to bait up,—'mighty fine night to get a hook into a few people from the other world. I wonder, now, would I pull up a devil if I was to throw a penny over?' and picked up his line to overhaul it. 'And bring my knife from my bunk when you come up, will you, Ned? ”

“ Back to their books, compiled by men but half of whom are grown, half developed, deficient in insight, in emotions, in experience of humanity. And, mind you, I'm not deriding science—I'm only saying, why do they not come out in the open and enlarge their vision? A man of the hills and the prairies, they tell me, rarely doubts. ”

“ Which is just what my wife wants; for every night, exactly at nine o'clock, she has the older children kneeling by their bedsides and saying a prayer for me. She prays with them. And I've got to where I say a prayer myself aboard the vessel at the same hour, if the weather'll allow. And there's where the chronometer comes into the story. You all know of the last gale out here on Georges. Of course. Fourteen vessels and one hundred and sixty-five men lost that night. Every third man and vessel of the hand-lining fleet went down inside twenty-four hours. ”

“ Superstition, that's it. What they don't understand, whatever's beyond their dull imaginations and souls—for the average scientist is weak in what we agree to call a soul—whatever's beyond them they say bah! ”

“ They are then inarticulate, like the child. Something, whatever it is, too big for them to understand. But they feel it, although they never stay long enough to grasp it quite, or to let it take full hold. ”

“ Live with them long enough, and you may come yourself to have the same limited senses, to see nothing delightful in flowers, sunsets, music, poetry, or in any of the beautiful things in life, for we certainly can lose the finer senses by gross living. ”

“ Aye, and so are ants, though mostly by way of example, and they mustn't mistake their little sand-heaps for Himalayas. Well, suppose we say one hundred years ago, or fifty or sixty years ago, before the cable was laid, a man came to them and said, 'The other day I sent a message across the sea—from a point in Newfoundland I asked a question of a man in Ireland, and got his answer.' What would they have said to that man? ”

“ These young fellows weren't old enough then to have got to where they could separate the true from the false; and so, seeing their elders preaching one thing and practising another, they come to the way of thinking that what their elders preached, as well as their elders themselves, must be in the wrong. ”

“ But the wonderful thing—just at the time of the flash, which we easily fixed by the cabin clock—old Bob there was to be relieved at the wheel on the hour, and the new man on watch had just looked at the clock—that same clock, which I then as well as now kept to exact time with the chronometers,—he'd just taken a peep and said, 'Less than a minute now,' and had drawn on his mitts and had one foot on the companionway steps there to go on deck, when the flash came. ”

“ The passenger was about to offer a theory, but the skipper raised a protesting hand. "Wait a bit with your scientists. And adhering to that, I came to be a better man. And from being a better man I came to have the courage to marry a girl that I'd almost begun to think was never to be for me; and, marrying her, life began to take on new aspects. It was no longer hard and gray, though 'twas terrible enough at times—mostly through fear for her. ”