--What year would that be about? Mr B interrogated. Can you recall the
boats?
Our SOI-DISANT sailor munched heavily awhile hungrily before answering:
--I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and ships.
Salt junk all the time.
Tired seemingly, he ceased. His questioner perceiving that he was not
likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer,
fell to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the
globe, suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed, it
covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly what
it meant to rule the waves. On more than one occasion, a dozen at the
lowest, near the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a superannuated
old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the not particularly
redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obliviously at it and it at him,
dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new as someone somewhere sings. And
it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to find out the secret
for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes and all that sort of
thing and over and under, well, not exactly under, tempting the fates.
And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no secret about it at
all. Nevertheless, without going into the MINUTIAE of the business, the
eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in all its glory and in the
natural course of things somebody or other had to sail on it and fly in
the face of providence though it merely went to show how people usually
contrived to load that sort of onus on to the other fellow like the hell
idea and the lottery and insurance which were run on identically the same
lines so that for that very reason if no other lifeboat Sunday was a
highly laudable institution to which the public at large, no matter where
living inland or seaside, as the case might be, having it brought home to
them like that should extend its gratitude also to the harbourmasters and
coastguard service who had to man the rigging and push off and out amid
the elements whatever the season when duty called IRELAND EXPECTS THAT
EVERY MAN and so on and sometimes had a terrible time of it in the
wintertime not forgetting the Irish lights, Kish and others, liable to
capsize at any moment, rounding which he once with his daughter had
experienced some remarkably choppy, not to say stormy, weather.
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