sense, nationality, or past history. Rebuttal
was precisely similar. I have related this in order to show the mental caliber
of the men with whom I was thrown in contact. Intellectually they were children,
inhabiting the physical forms of men.
    And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and
offensive-smelling tobacco. The air was thick and murky with the smoke of it;
and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she struggled
through the storm, would surely have made me seasick had I been a victim to that
malady. As it was, it made me quite squeamish, though this nausea might have
been due to the pain of my leg and exhaustion.
    As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation. It
was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a
dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here
on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had never done any hard
manual labor, or scullion labor, in my life. I had lived a placid, uneventful,
sedentary existence all my days - the life of a scholar and a recluse on an
assured and comfortable income. Violent life and athletic sports had never
appealed to me. I had always been a book-worm; so my sisters and father had
called me during my childhood. I had gone camping but once in my life, and then
I left the party almost at its start and returned to the comforts and
conveniences of a roof. And here I was, with dreary and endless vistas before me
of table-setting, potato-peeling, and dishwashing. And I was not strong. The
doctors had always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never
developed it or my body through exercise. My muscles were small and soft, like a
woman's, or so the doctors had said time and again in the course of their
attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads. But I had preferred
to use my head, rather than my body; and here I was, in no fit condition for the
rough life in prospect.
    These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are
related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and helpless
rôle I was destined to play. But I thought, also, of my mother and sisters, and
pictured their grief. I was among the missing dead of the Martinez disaster, an
unrecovered