The sailors have a
toilsome life, and must endure much; but they have health. It is the
sense of physical well-being that makes the mind so easy when one is on
the sea; and refined men who have lived in the forecastle readily
declare that they were happy but for the invariable dirt. Instead of
trooping to stuffy lodgings, those of my readers who have the nerve
should, if not this year, then next summer, go right away and take a
cheap and charming holiday on the open sea.
_October, 1887._
_WAR._
The brisk Pressmen are usually exceedingly busy in calculating the
chances of a huge fight--indeed they spend a good part of each year in
that pleasing employment. Smug diplomatists talk glibly about "war
clearing the air;" and the crowd--the rank and file--chatter as though
war were a pageant quite divorced from wounds and death, or a mere
harmless hurly-burly where certain battalions receive thrashings of a
trifling nature. It is saddening to notice the levity with which the
most awful of topics is treated, and especially is it sad to see how
completely the women and children are thrust out of mind by belligerent
persons. We who have gazed on the monster of War, we who have looked in
the whites--or rather the reds--of his loathsome eyes, cannot let this
burst of frivolity work mischief without one temperate word of warning
and protest.
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