here across the deck, as others are doing. Cover yourself with
great-coats, like an Irishman, to keep yourself cool, and let us
meditate little on this strange thing, and strange place, which holds
us now.

Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every heave of the
long glassy swell. How those sails flap, and thunder, and rage, with
useless outcries and struggles--only because they are idle. Let the
wind take them, and they will be steady, silent in an instant--their
deafening dissonant grumbling exchanged for the soft victorious song
of the breeze through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as of
bird on bough. So it is through life; there is no true rest but
labour. "No true misery," as Carlyle says, "but in that of not being
able to work." Some may call it a pretty conceit. I call it a great
worldwide law, which reaches from earth to heaven. Whatever the
Preacher may have thought it in a moment of despondency, what is it
but a blessing that "sun, and wind, and rivers, and ocean," as he
says, and "all things, are full of labour--man cannot utter it."
This sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in and
out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in the
very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may have
hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaring
white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa-
nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to the
left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and
tropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their
fragile shells of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in
fleets from the far west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where they
have been sailing out their little life, never touching shore or
ground, but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in at