The labour is lightened, as hand labour always has been lightened, by singing to the rhythm of the work. The seaman's working songs are chanties, a kind of homespun poetry which, once heard to its rolling music and the sound of wind and wave, will always bring back the very savour of the sea wherever it is heard again. There are thousands of chanties in scores of languages, which, like the men who sing them, have met and mingled all round the {111} world. They are the folklore of a class apart, which differs, as landsmen differ, in ways and speech and racial ambition, but which is also drawn together, as landsmen never have been, by that strange blend of strife and communing with man and nature which is only known at sea. They will not bear quotation in cold print, where they are as pitiably out of place as an albatross on deck. No mere reader can feel the stir of that grand old chanty Hurrah! my boys, we're homeward bound! unless he has heard it when all hands make sail on leaving port, and the deck begins pulsating with the first throb of the swell that sets in landward across the bar. And what can this chorus really mean to any one who has never heard it roared by strong male voices to the running accompaniment of seething water overside? What ho, Piper! watch her how she goes! Give her sheet and let her rip. We're the boys to pull her through. You ought to see her rolling home; For she's the gal to go In the passage home in ninety days From Cal-i-for-ni-o! But though you can no more wrest a chanty from its surroundings and then pass it off as a {112} seaman's folk-song than you can take the blue from the water or the crimson from the sunset, yet, as some chanties have become so well known ashore, as others so richly deserve to be known there, and as all are now being threatened with extinction, perhaps a few may be mentioned in passing. _Away for Rio_! with its wild, queer wail in the middle of its full-toned chorus, has always been a great favourite afloat: For we're bound for Rio Grande, And away Rio! ay Rio! Sing fare-ye-well, my bonny young girl, We're bound for Rio Grande. The _Wide Missouri_ is a magnificent song for baritones and basses on the water: Oh, Shenando'h, I love your daughter, 'Way-ho, the rolling river! Oh, Shenando'h, I long to hear you, 'Way-ho, we're bound away, Down the broad Missouri. A famous capstan chanty is well known on land, whence, indeed, it originally came: And it's hame, dearie, hame; oh! it's hame I want to be. My topsails are hoisted and I must out to sea; But the oak and the ash and the bonnie birchen tree, They're all a-growin' green in the North Countree. --which is quite as appropriate to the _Nova {113} Scotia_ as to the one beyond the North Atlantic. A favourite sail-setting chanty is _Solo_. Haul on the bowlin', the fore and maintop bowlin'-- _Chorus_. Haul on the bowlin', the bowlin' haul!