Young Carrington drew in his breath sharply. "Close enough," he echoed. "I should say it was. That's the only trouble with you pioneers, Lieutenant. You get so interested in what you're doing that you get reckless, and then you blaze ahead with some fool experiment, and the first thing you know something happens. Then they grapple your boat up, and lay you all decently away on dry land, where you belong, and some other chap has the benefit of your experience, and knows one thing more to avoid if he's anxious to keep his health. It's glorious, Lieutenant, but it's going ahead too fast. There's such a thing as being too brave." Osborne smiled. "Oh, well, of course there's some risk," he acquiesced; "no one would deny that. But not nearly so much as you think. We're pretty well prepared for all emergencies now, and in the last analysis the interior of a submarine isn't the only dangerous place in the world. It sounds trite to say 'you never can tell,' but that's what danger and death amount to, after all." Vanulm nodded assent. "You're right, Lieutenant," he said. "You see it and read of it every day. A man makes a trip through darkest Africa and comes home to be run over by a trolley car. We take a thousand risks by land and sea, far and wide, and then come to peace and safety, and break our leg going down the cellar stairs. 'You never can tell' hits it about right for most of us." Osborne nodded. "I'm afraid I've monopolized the conversation too much already," he said, "but I'd like to tell you a queer illustration of this that we had at the yards a year or so ago. One of the construction men there was a Norwegian named Rolfson, a man with the most remarkable head for heights, barring none, that I think I've ever seen. He was celebrated even among his mates, and you can imagine what that means among men who are just as much at home walking about like flies on top of a girder sixty feet from the ground as we are seated here at this table this moment. Well, one day this fellow--not out of bravado, you understand; he wasn't that kind, but just because he took a notion to do it--after he got through a job he was doing on the mainmast of a big seven-master, deliberately climbed clean up to the main truck, somehow crawled on top of it, and stood there, one hundred and eighty-seven feet above the deck, waving his cap to the fellows below. How was that for absolute nerve? "Well, the point I am coming to is this: Three or four months later this same man, working on a staging about thirty-five feet above the deck of a bark, sitting down, mind you, with a support on either side of him to hang on to, fell and broke his neck. We never knew just what the trouble really was. He might have looked down, I suppose, or might have been taken suddenly ill; possibly all at once he lost his nerve. That happens sometimes. We never knew. So, you see, you can't always tell what's risky and what isn't."