It is a poor task bringing book evidence to the average sailor. Marshal your authorities as you may, you will ever be met with the stolid question, "How do _you_ know? You _wasn't_ there!" etc., until you retire like a man who in the dark has run head first against a stone wall. It is no good to argue with the average sailor, either. He lives in a little world of his own, its horizon bounded by the blue sky, and unbroken by any vision of the movements of shore-dwellers except at long intervals. Then when those brief periods of contact with landward folk arrive, he is like a boy suddenly let loose from school. He forgets his sea-troubles, his long confinement, in the strange sensation of liberty. How can these men be expected to use their freedom wisely? Their experience of it is so limited, their ignorance of shore ways so pathetic, that it would be surely a miracle to see them behave themselves in reasonable fashion. But one peculiarity I have often noticed among sailors is their preternatural suspicion, allied to a blind trustfulness--two opposite qualities meeting. Only, with the perversity of poor human nature, they exercise suspicion where they should be trustful, and confidence where they should be most cautious. Any scoundrel that lays himself out to cajole and cheat a sailor is almost certain to succeed, while a philanthropist, aiming only at the seaman's highest welfare, will find it a most difficult and disheartening task to gain his confidence or even attention. And so it comes to pass that at seamen's missions, wherever anything is being done for destitute sailors, the greatest care has to be exercised, the wisest discrimination used, in order that meals, etc., provided are not entirely monopolized by longshoremen, and the sailor conspicuous by his absence. It must always be borne in mind that the sailor is just a big child, whose opportunities for being understood by shore people are almost _nil_, who cannot tell you what he wants, and whose life is hidden from you. Herein is one of the greatest difficulties confronting missions to seamen. They have but a very short time to work upon any individual sailor, only a few days wherein to teach him things that shore people, when they learn them at all, often take years to acquire, and then the exigencies of his calling remove him from all those hallowed influences for perhaps four or five months on end. On shore it is recognized by all the Churches that if you would do good it is not sufficient to preach godliness to people: you must provide for them the right kind of society in lieu of that which they must abandon, you must nurse them through their period of babyhood in grace until they are able to stand, or walk, or run, in the way of righteousness. But the poor sailor gets no such nursing. Before he has scarcely awakened to the fact that old things have passed away, all things have become new, he is back again to the fo'c'sle. And now he is very lonely,