 I must do these men justice. Callous as they were to my suffering,
they were equally callous to their own when anything befell them. And this was
due, I believe, first, to habit; and second, to the fact that they were less
sensitively organized. I really believe that a finely organized, high-strung man
would suffer twice and thrice as much as they from a like injury.
    Tired as I was, - exhausted, in fact, - I was prevented from sleeping by the
pain in my knee. It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud. At home I
should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and elemental
environment seemed to call for a savage repression. Like the savage, the
attitude of these men was stoical in great things, childish in little things. I
remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the hunters, lose a
finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did not even murmur or change the
expression on his face. Yet I have seen the same man, time and again, fly into
the most outrageous passion over a trifle.
    He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing
like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to
whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim. He held that it did, that it
could swim the moment it was born. The other hunter, Latimer, a lean,
Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held
that the seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it could
not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were
compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.
    For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay in
their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists. But they were
supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took sides, and
sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged back and forth in
waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space. Childish and
immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more
childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at
all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation. They
proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the
proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the
opposing man's judgment, common
