The worst mutiny in the _Saint Christopher_, however, was of quite another kind. The remaining crew had no objection to the captain--they were human themselves--and no desire to paddle their own canoes. But they got thoroughly weary of sailing day after day into the same sunset, decided that there was no El Dorado, and insisted clamorously on putting the ship about. But in what direction? Some were for going home; they said all talk of another world was nonsense, that those Hopes and Miracles were worthless, and that the only thing to do was to return to the old country and live there in the old way, making the best of it. But the majority said that such an acknowledgment of defeat and error would be ignominious; and that life at home, never really happy, would now be doubly intolerable. They would never have set out on so problematical an expedition, had they found life possible in their native seats. But it had been horrible. They remembered with a shudder the cruelties and vanities of their ancestral heathenism. They were adventurers and mariners by nature. They might be now bewildered for a moment and discouraged in their explorations, but the impulse to hope for the better and to try the unknown was ineradicable in their breast. In some of them, indeed, this brave impulse was so vigorous, that they now had a sudden intuition of the romantic principle of life, and harangued their companions as follows: "What need, O shipmates, to sail for _any_ port? The sailor is not a land animal. How we chafed and stifled when we lived on _terra firma_, pent in those horrible stone dungeons called houses and churches, and compelled to till those inert and filthy clods, year in and year out--a most stupefying existence! Let us sail for the sake of sailing. It was not in putting forth into this infinite sea that we were ill-advised, but only in imagining that we could reach an opposite shore, and that the sea was not infinite but hemmed about by dead land. That was a gross illusion. In reality there is no _terra firma_ at all, but only ships and rafts more or less extensive, covered over with earth and trees, riding on the water. Fancy deceived us, when we supposed that our Earth was anchored in some deeper earth. It floats and drifts upon a bottomless flood, and will dissolve into it. Do not dream of any backward voyage, or of reaching home. You will never find that old home again; it exists no longer. But this good ship of ours, with its wind-blown sails, can never sink and can never stop. If the banners and crosses, which we still fly in deference to custom, have lost their meaning for us, other symbols will take their place. We must not confuse our infinite task with the illusions that may first have prompted us to undertake it. A brave and an endless life awaits us, battling with the storms of winter; in the summer days, leaping over the waves with the dolphins and the porpoises; in the watches