It was a lad that they had saved, not a full-grown man, except in the sense of his height, which was nearly an inch beyond Alister’s. He was insensible, and I thought he was dead, so death-like was the pallor of his face in contrast with the dark curls of his head and the lashes of his closed eyes. We were dipping to leeward, his head rolled a little on the rough pillow that had been heaped to raise him, and his white face against the inky waves reminded me of the face of the young lord in Charlie’s father’s church, who died abroad, and a marble figure of him was sent home from Italy, with his dog lying at his feet. His shoulders were raised as well as his head, and his jacket and shirt had both been washed open by the waves.
And that was how I got the key to the Irishmen’s dialogue. For round the lad’s throat was a black ribbon, pendant from which a small cross of ebony was clear to be seen upon his naked breast; and on this there glittered in the moonlight a silver image of the Redeemer of the World.
CHAPTER VI.
“Why, what’s that to you, if my eyes I’m a wiping?
A tear is a pleasure, d’ye see, in its way;
‘Tis nonsense for trifles, I own, to be piping,
But they that ha’n’t pity, why I pities they.
* * * * * * * *
The heart and the eyes, you see feel the same motion,
And if both shed their drops, ’tis all the same end;
And thus ’tis that every tight lad of the ocean
Sheds his blood for his country, his tears for his friend.”
Charles Dibdin.
If one wants to find the value of all he has learned in the way of righteousness, common-sense, and real skill of any sort; or to reap most quickly what he has sown to obedience, industry, and endurance, let him go out and rough it in the world.
There he shall find that a conscience early trained to resist temptation and to feel shame will be to him the instinctive clutch that may now and again—in an ungraceful, anyhow fashion—keep him from slipping down to perdition, and save his soul alive. There he shall find that whatever he has really learned by labour
or grasped with inborn talent, will sooner or later come to the surface to his credit and for his good; but that what he swaggers will not even find fair play. There, in brief, he shall find his level—a great matter for most men. There, in fine, he will discover that there being a great deal of human nature in all men, and a great deal that is common to all lives—if he has learned to learn and is good-natured withal, he may live pretty comfortably anywhere—
“As a rough rule,
The rough world’s a good school,”—