Brown, send those fellows back
with the bayonet. None but blue-jackets allowed on the beach!" And the
labourers go up again, grumbling.
"Can't trust those landsharks. They'll plunder even the rings off a
corpse's fingers. They think every wreck a godsend. I've known them,
after they've been driven off, roll great stones over the cliff at
night on the coast-guard, just out of spite; while these blue-jackets
here--I can depend on them. Can you tell me the reason of that, as you
seem a bit of a philosopher?"
"It is easy enough; the sailors have a fellow-feeling with sailors,
and the landsmen have none. Besides, the sailors are finer fellows,
body and soul; and the reason is that they have been brought up to
face danger, and the landsmen haven't."
"Well," said the Lieutenant, "unless a man has been taught to look
death in the face, he never will grow up, I believe, to be much of a
man at all."
"Danger, my good sir, is a better schoolmaster than all your new model
schools, diagrams, and scientific apparatus. It made our forefathers
the masters of the sea, though they never heard of popular science;
and I dare say couldn't, one out of ten of them, spell their own
names."
This sentiment elicited from the Lieutenant a grunt of approbation, as
Tom intended that it should do; shrewdly arguing that the old martinet
was no friend to the modern superstition, that all which is required
to cast out the devil is a smattering of the 'ologies.
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