sleep.

Singleton stood at the door with his face to the light and his back to
the darkness. And alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle
he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself,
who should have come there into this place as quiet as a sepulchre to
contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler.
Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and
forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a
ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike
impulses and his man's passions already dead within his tattooed breast.
The men who could understand his silence were gone--those men who knew
how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They
had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes.
They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly
and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as
whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work
in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil,
privation, violence, debauchery--but knew not fear, and had no desire
of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire;
voiceless men--but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental
voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique
and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege
of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and, indispensable,
without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home--and
died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They were the
everlasting children of the mysterious sea. Their successors are the
grown-up children of a discontented earth. They are less naughty, but
less innocent; less profane, but perhaps also less believing; and if
they have learned how to speak they have also learned how to whine. But