"Well," he would wind up, "I guess it don't much matter.

I can't see what any one wants to live for, anyway.

If I could get into some one else's apple-tree, and be about twelve years old, and just stick the way I was, eating stolen apples, I won't say.

But there's no sense in this grown-up business--sailorising, politics, the piety mill, and all the rest of it.

Good clean drowning is good enough for me." It is hard to imagine any more depressing talk for a poor landsman on a dirty night; it is hard to imagine anything less sailor-like (as sailors are supposed to be, and generally are) than this persistent harping on the minor.
But I was to see more of the man's gloomy constancy ere the cruise was at an end.
On the morning of the seventeenth day I came on deck, to find the schooner under double reefs, and flying rather wild before a heavy run of sea.