“Not a bit. Byron wrote about piracy, but Byron was no seaman, and he didn’t know what hazing a crew meant. A thief’s a dirty scoundrel all the world over, and always has been; and a sea thief, having the scum of the earth to handle, has to make himself the crudest brute on earth if he wants to succeed. I think it’s that which put me out of liking with Byron and all those poets who’ve written about movement at sea. They give a wrong idea of men’s motives and actions, and when they get talking on shop, they’re that inaccurate and absurd they make one tired. No, Mr. Onslow, give me a land poet, who talks about farms, and primroses, and tinkling brooks, and things he understands, and with that man I can sit through two watches on end. Reading him may make me feel low, but it doesn’t do a man harm to be that way sometimes. Ye see, Mr. Onslow, a scuffle, or a row with a mutinous crew, is just meat and drink to me. Yes, sir, that’s the kind of brute I am.” They chatted and basked during the rest of the afternoon, whilst the two mates off watch painted ironwork, and the crew off duty grumbled and smoked and slept in the stuffy forecastle. The cabin tea came. Kettle, at the head of the table, preserved a sour silence, and Onslow and the mates carried amongst them a strained civility. And then skipper and supernumerary officer returned to their canvas chairs beside the fiddley on the bridge-deck. The Gulf Stream rippled crisply over the steamer’s wake astern, and the small wavelets of a calm licked the yellow rust-stains which patched her sweeping flank. Before them the narrow sea was the color of a dull blue roofing-slate. The bright, hot day had faded; the brilliant cobalt had filtered away from overhead, and a silver nail-paring of moon peered from a sky of amorphous violet, still lighted in its higher flats by the sun’s after-glow. On the horizon line was what at first appeared to be a steamer’s smoke, but what the glass showed to be the reek of a fire on the invisible, low-lying Florida coast. No blaze-glow could be seen. It might be a fisher’s camp-fire on an outlying key; it might be a game-driving of Seminole Indians beyond the explored coast-fringe, in that unknown tangle of trees and grasses and lagoons, the Everglades themselves. “It’s worth living, Mr. Onslow, times like these,” said Kettle, when they had sat there in silence till the warm night had spread all over, and the white stars were beginning to show in multitudes through its gaps. The other nodded, sucking at his cold pipe. “None of those poets have ever put all this down on paper. They’ve got parts—bits—but not all. I fancy it is because they haven’t seen the thing for themselves. I’ve tried myself, but I haven’t made much account of it.” “What, you—you’re a poet?” Onslow rapped out.