Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

I followed the house-governor out of the dining-rooms into a large apartment, well stored with books, magazines, etc., the gifts of friends of the charity. This I was told was the reading-room. It looked on to the green grounds, and was a most cheerful and delightful chamber. Further on was another room furnished with bagatelle boards and side tables for cribbage, etc. There was a particular cleanness and neatness everywhere visible, and I asked who did the work of the house. The house-governor answered, “The inmates. The more active among them are put to washing down and dusting at ten o’clock, and they finish at twelve. This is all the work required of them. Throughout the rest of the day they have nothing to do but to lounge about the grounds and amuse themselves as they please in the bagatelle or reading rooms, or in the smoking-room, which is a large apartment in the basement.” Mounting the wide stone staircase, and admiring as I went the singularly handsome and lavishly-embellished interior of the very fine building, I found myself on a floor devoted to the sleeping-rooms. These consist of rows of bulkheads partitioning off little cabins, each with a door and a number, and furnished with a comfortable bed, and some of them were movingly decorated by photographs of a mother, a sister, a child, with humble memorials saved from the wreck of the past; such relics of the old home as a few china chimneypiece ornaments, a coloured picture, and the like, with here and there a sea-chest, though, as a rule, these little cabins, as they are called, were conspicuously empty of all suggestions of marine life. Now and again the opening of a door would disclose an old man seated on his bed, darning a sock or mending a shirt. It might have been that they were used to the visits of strangers; but I could not help observing in all these old seamen an utter indifference to our presence and inspection, a look of deep abstraction, as if their minds were leagues astern of them or far ahead, and existence were an obligation with which they had no sympathy, and of which they never took notice unless their attention was compelled to it.

“Here,” said the governor, taking me into a room in which three or four old men were assembled—for dinner had been finished some time, and the seamen had quitted the tables—“is a veteran who has taught himself how to write. Show us your copy-book, my man,” said he, giving him his name.

The old fellow produced his book with a great air of pride, and I was struck by the excellence of the writing.

“Is this all your own doing?” I asked.

“Ay, sir, every stroke. It’s been a bit of a job; for, you see, when a man’s nearing eighty ye can’t say that his brain’s like a young ’un’s.”

“This would shame many a youngster, nevertheless,” said I.

“I’d be prouder if I could read it, though,” he exclaimed, with the anxious and yet gentle expression that seemed a characteristic of the faces in this institution.

“Ah, I see,” said I. “You can copy, but cannot read what you copy. Never mind! that will come too, presently.”

“I’m afeard not,” said he, shaking his head. “Writin’s one thing, readin’s another. I have learned to write, but dunno as ever I shall be able to read it.”

The governor, with an encouraging smile, told him to persevere, and then led the way to one of the sick wards, where I found a very aged man in bed, and two others seated at a table.