"A ship it is a funny thing, It sails upon the sea--"
The Chief does not recall the rest of the stanza, but we all admit the truth of what he does remember. Ship life on the whole is not like other life; ship characteristics do not altogether resemble those on land.
Take the "Porpoise," for instance. I have no doubt that the Porpoise on land is a most excellent and industrious business man, more or less absorbed in the daily round of his ventures--a happy-hearted contented Hebrew person, fairly quiet (it doesn't seem possible, but I am willing to believe it), on the whole a good citizen, satisfied if his name appears now and then in the local paper, when he gets in some new line of goods or makes an improvement on his home.
But on shipboard the Porpoise is just--a porpoise. He is fat, as his name implies, and describes revolutions of the ship, blowing constantly. At no time of day and in no part of the ship will you be safe from the Porpoise. He is from an interior town--an unimportant town, by its census and location, but it has become important on this vessel.
He has instructed us upon other subjects, too. Nothing is too complicated, or too deep, or too abstruse for the Porpoise. He will attack any question at sight, and he will puff and spout and describe circles and wallow in his oratory, and follow his audience about until he has swept the deck clean. Yet we love that Porpoise, in spite of everything. He is so happy and harmless and gentle. It is only because he is on a ship that he is a bore.
Also, we love the "Mill." The Mill is a woman--a good woman--one of the kindliest souls on earth, I suspect, and her mouth is her warrant for her name. It goes all the time, but it does not deal with important things. Indeed, nothing is too unimportant for her hopper, and she grinds exceeding small. Just now, for an hour or so, she has been explaining that she did not sleep very well last night, and minutely cataloguing the reasons why. She will keep it up for another hour, and then if somebody hasn't dropped her overboard she will dig up something else of equal value and go right on, refreshed and rejoicing in the consciousness of well-doing.
The Mill would not act this way at home--she would not have time. It is only because she is on a ship where everybody is idle and irresponsible and "different," and likely to be peculiar. As Laura, age fourteen, said to me to-day--paraphrasing the words of the old Quaker spinster to her sister, "I think everybody on this ship is peculiar except thee and me, and sometimes I think _thee_ is a little peculiar." That expresses the situation, and on the whole we enjoy it. We are like the little boy whose reputation for being a strange child did not interfere with his happiness. "Gee, ain't it great to be crazy!" was his favorite remark, and whatever we may be on this ship, we are content with the conditions, and would not change them, even if we could.