"I suppose they like it, as some people do hot peppers."
"Or donkeys thistles;—find a little pain pleasant! I had a patient once in France, who read Dumas' 'Crimes Célèbres' all the week, and the 'Vies des Saints' on Sundays, and both, as far as I could see, for just the same purpose,—to see how miserable people could be, and how much pinching and pulling they could bear."
So they walked on, along a sheep-path, and over the Spur, and down to the Cove.
It was such a morning as often follows a gale, when the great firmament stares down upon the ruin which it has made, bright and clear, and bold; and seems to say, with shameless smile,—"There, I have done it; and am as merry as ever after it all!" Beneath a cloudless sky, the breakers, still grey and foul from the tempest, were tumbling in before a cold northern breeze. Half a mile out at sea, the rough backs of the Chough and Crow loomed black and sulky in the foam. At their feet, the rocks and shingle of the Cove were alive with human beings—groups of women and children clustering round a corpse or a chest; sailors, knee-deep in the surf hauling at floating spars and ropes; oil-skinned coast-guardsmen pacing up and down in charge of goods, while groups of farmers' men, who had hurried down from the villages inland, lounged about on the top of the cliff, looking sulkily on, hoping for plunder: and yet half afraid to mingle with the sailors below, who looked on them as an inferior race, and refused, in general, to intermarry with them.
The Lieutenant plainly held much the same opinion; for as a party of them tried to descend the narrow path to the beach, he shouted after them to come back.
"Eh! you won't?" and out rattled from its scabbard the old worthy's sword. "Come back, I say, you loafing, miching, wrecking crow-keepers; there are no pickings for you here. Brown, send those fellows back with the bayonet. None but blue-jackets allowed on the beach!" And the labourers go up again, grumbling.
"Can't trust those landsharks. They'll plunder even the rings off a corpse's fingers. They think every wreck a godsend. I've known them, after they've been driven off, roll great stones over the cliff at night on the coast-guard, just out of spite; while these blue-jackets here—I can depend on them. Can you tell me the reason of that, as you seem a bit of a philosopher?"
"It is easy enough; the sailors have a fellow-feeling with sailors, and the landsmen have none. Besides, the sailors are finer fellows, body and soul; and the reason is that they have been brought up to face danger, and the landsmen haven't."
"Well," said the Lieutenant, "unless a man has been taught to look death in the face, he never will grow up, I believe, to be much of a man at all."
"Danger, my good sir, is a better schoolmaster than all your new model schools, diagrams, and scientific apparatus. It made our forefathers the masters of the sea, though they never heard of popular science; and I dare say couldn't, one out of ten of them, spell their own names."