[Illustration: 198]
THEY are sailor boys, regular little sea-dogs. Look at them; they have
their caps pulled down over their ears so that the gale blowing in from
the sea and bringing the spindrift with it may not deafen them with its
dreadful howling. They wear heavy woollen clothes to keep out the cold
and wet. Their patched pea-jacket and breeches have been their elders’
before them. Most of their garments have been contrived out of old
things of their father’s. Their soul is likewise of the same stuff as
their father’s; it is simple, brave, and long-suffering. At birth they
inherited a single-hearted, noble temper. Who and what gave it them?
After God and their parents, the Sea. The Sea teaches sailors courage by
teaching them to face danger. It is a rough but kindly instructor.
That is why our little sailor-boys, though their hearts are childlike
still, have the spirit of gallant veterans. Elbows on the parapet of the
sea-wall, they gaze out into the offing. It is more than the blue line
marking the faint division between sea and sky that they see. Their eyes
care little for the soft, changing colours of the ocean or the vast,
contorted masses of the clouds. What they see, as they look seawards,
is something more moving than the hue of the waves or the shape of the
clouds; it is a suggestion of human love. They are spying for the boats
that sailed away for the fishing; presently they will loom again on the
horizon, laden with shrimp to the gunwales, and bringing home uncles
and big brothers and fathers. The little fleet will soon appear yonder
betwixt the ocean and God’s sky with its white or brown sails. To-day
the sky is unclouded, the sea calm; the flood tide floats the fishers
gently to the shore. But the Ocean is a capricious old fellow, who takes
all shapes and sings in many voices. To-day he laughs; to-morrow he will
be growling in the night under his beard of foam. He shipwrecks the most
handy boats, though they have been blessed by the Priest to the chanting
of the _Te Deum_; he drowns the most skilful master mariners, and it is
all his fault you see in the village, before the cottage doors where
the nets hang to dry beside the fish-creels, so many women wearing black
widow’s weeds.