bluff ocean. At meals he is superb, not only for his strengths, but his weaknesses. He has somehow or other come to think me a wag, and if I ask him to pass the butter, detects an occult joke, and laughs as much as is proper for a mate. For you must know that our social hierarchy on shipboard is precise, and the second mate, were he present, would only laugh half as much as the first. Mr. X. always combs his hair, and works himself into a black frock-coat (on Sundays he adds a waistcoat) before he comes to meals, sacrificing himself nobly and painfully to the social proprieties. The second mate, on the other hand, who eats after us, enjoys the privilege of shirtsleeves, and is, I think, the happier man of the two. We do not have seats above and below the salt, as in old time, but above and below the white sugar. Mr. X. always takes brown sugar, and it is delightful to see how he ignores the existence of certain delicates which he considers above his grade, tipping his head on one side with an air of abstraction, so that he may seem not to deny himself, but to omit helping himself from inadvertence or absence of mind. At such times he wrinkles his forehead in a peculiar manner, inscrutable at first as a cuneiform inscription, but as easily read after you once get the key. The sense of it is something like this: 'I, X., know my place, a height of wisdom attained by few. Whatever you may think, I do not see that currant jelly, nor that preserved grape. Especially, a kind Providence has made me blind to bowls of white sugar, and deaf to the pop of champagne corks. It is much that a merciful compensation gives me a sense of the dingier hue of Havanna, and the muddier

gurgle of beer. Are there potted meats? My physician has ordered me three pounds of minced salt-junk at every meal.' There is such a thing, you know, as a ship's husband: X. is the ship's poor relation.

As I have said, he takes also a below-the-whitesugar interest in the jokes, laughing by precise point of compass, just as he would lay the ship's course, all yawing being out of the question with his scrupulous decorum at the helm. Once or twice I have got the better of him, and touched him off into a kind of compromised explosion, like that of damp fireworks, that splutter and simmer a little, and then go out with painful slowness and occasional relapses. But his fuse is always of the unwillingest, and you must blow your match, and touch him off again and again with the same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him many times to get him en rapport with a jest. This once accomplished, you have him, and one bit of fun will last the whole voyage. He prefers those of one syllable, the a-b abs of humour. The gradual fattening of the steward, a benevolent mulatto with whiskers and ear-rings, who looks as if he had been meant for a woman, and had become a man by accident, as in some of those stories of the elder physiologists, is an abiding topic of humorous comment with Mr. X. That 'ere stooard,' he says, with a brown grin like what you might fancy on the face of a serious and aged seal, "'s agittin' as fat's a porpis. He was as thin's a shingle when he come aboord last v'yge. Them trousis'll bust yit. He don't darst take 'em off nights, for the whole ship's company couldn't git him into 'em agin.' And then he turns aside to enjoy the intensity of his

emotion by himself, and you hear at intervals low rumblings, an indigestion of laughter. He tells me of St. Elmo's fires, Marvell's corposants, though with him the original corpos santos has suffered a sea change, and turned to comepleasants, pledges of fine weather. I shall not soon find a pleasanter companion. It is so delightful to meet a man who knows just what you do not. Nay, I think the tired mind finds something in plump ignorance like what the body feels in cushiony moss. Talk of the sympathy of kindred pursuits! It is the sympathy of the upper and nether millstones, both for ever grinding the same grist, and wearing each other smooth. One has not far to seek for booknature, artist-nature, every variety of superinduced nature, in short, but genuine human-nature is hard to find. And how good it is! Wholesome as a potato, fit company for any dish. The freemasonry of cultivated men is agreeable, but artificial, and I like better the natural grip with which manhood recognizes manhood.

X. has one good story, and with that I leave him, wishing him with all my heart that little inland farm at last which is his calenture as he paces the windy deck. One evening, when the clouds looked wild and whirling, I asked X. if it was coming on to blow. 'No, I guess not,' said he; bumby the moon'll be up, and scoff away that 'ere loose stuff.' His intonation set the phrase scoff away' in quotation marks as plain as print. So I put a query in each eye, and he went on. Ther' was a Dutch cappen onct, an' his mate come to him in the cabin, where he sot takin' his schnapps, an' says, "Cappen, it's agittin' thick, an' looks kin' o' squally; hedn't we's good's

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shorten sail?" "Gimmy my alminick," says the cappen. So he looks at it a spell, an' says he, "The moon's due in less 'n half an hour, an' she'll scoff away ev'ythin' clare agin." So the mate he goes, an' bumby down he comes agin', an' says, Cappen, this 'ere's the allfiredest, powerfullest moon 't ever you did see. She's scoffed away the maintogallants'l, an' she's to work on the foretops'l now. Guess you'd better look in the alminick agin, an' fin' out when this moon sets." So the cappen thought 'twas 'bout time to go on deck. Dreadful slow them Dutch cappens be.' And X. walked away, rumbling inwardly like the rote of the sea heard afar.

And so we arrived at Malta. Did you ever hear of one of those eating-houses where, for a certain fee, the guest has the right to make one thrust with a fork into a huge pot, in which the whole dinner is bubbling, getting perhaps a bit of boiled meat, or a potato, or else nothing? Well, when the great cauldron of war is seething, and the nations stand around it striving to fish out something to their purpose from the mess, Britannia always has a great advantage in her trident. Malta is one of the tit-bits she has impaled with that awful implement. I was not sorry for it, when I reached my clean inn, with its kindly English landlady.

JOHN RUSKIN

1819-1900

THE EXTENSION OF RAILWAYS IN THE
LAKE DISTRICT'

A PROTEST

THE evidence collected in the following pages, in support of their pleading, is so complete, and the summary of his cause given with so temperate mastery by Mr. Somervell, that I find nothing to add in circumstance, and little to reinforce in argument. And I have less heart to the writing even of what brief preface so good work might by its author's courtesy be permitted to receive from me, occupied as I so long have been in efforts tending in the same direction, because, on that very account, I am far less interested than my friend in this local and limited resistance to the elsewhere fatally victorious current of modern folly, cruelty, and ruin. When the frenzy of avarice is daily drowning our sailors, suffocating our miners, poisoning our children, and blasting the cultivable surface of England into a treeless

1 Preface to a pamphlet compiled (1876) by Robert Somervell, entitled 'A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District' (Windermere, J. Garnett; London, Simpkin, Marshall & Co.).