They
shivered and gasped for breath as they forged their bitter way into
the gale, and few were they who took more than a single turn of the
deck. Like beaten cowards they soon slunk into the sheltered spots,
or sought even less heroic means of surrender by tumbling into bed
with the considerate help of unsmiling stewards. The great ship went
up and the great ship came down: when up so high that the sky seemed
to be startlingly near and down so horribly low that the bottom of
the ocean was even nearer. And it creaked and groaned and sighed even
above the wild monody of the wind, like a thing in misery, yet all
the while holding its sides to keep from bursting with laughter over
the plight of the little creature whom God made after His own image
but not until after all of the big things of the universe had been
designed.
R. Schmidt, being a good sailor and a hardy young chap, albeit a
prince of royal blood, was abroad early, after a breakfast that
staggered the few who remained unstaggered up to that particular
crisis. A genial sailor-man and an equally ungenial deck swabber
advised him, in totally different styles of address, to stay below if
he knew what was good for him, only to be thanked with all the
blitheness of a man who jolly well knows what is good for him, or who
doesn't care whether it is good for him or not so long as he is doing
the thing that he wants to do.
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