_Isolation_--that is the word; the men know little of the world; they are infantine without being petty; they have no curiosity about the passage of events on shore, and their solid world is represented by an area of 70 feet by 18.

They are always amusing, always suggestive, and always superhumanly ignorant of the commonest concerns that affect the lives of ordinary men.

When your intellect first begins to measure theirs, you feel as if you had been put down in a strange country, and had to adapt your mind and soul to such a set of conditions as might come before you in a dream.

I, the transcriber of this history, felt humiliated when a good man, who had been to sea for thirty-three years on a stretch, asked me whether "them things is only made up"; them things being a set of spirited natural history pictures.
I reckon if I took Mr.Herbert Spencer, or Mr.Grant Allen, or Mr.Lang out to the fleets, I could give them a few shrewd observations regarding the infancy of the human mind.
There was a fair amount of room for a religious service, the men packed themselves into their places with admirable and silent politeness, and the yacht was transformed into a mission hall.

As to the fishermen's singing, one can never talk of it sufficiently.