"The green waves toss out little boat as children toss a ball, peer at us over the boat's sides, rise above our heads, roar, shake, drop us into deep pits. We rise again on the white crests, but the coast runs farther and farther away from us and seems to dance like our boat. Then my father said to me:
"'Maybe you will return to land, but I--never. Listen and I will tell you something about a fisherman's work.'
"And he began to tell me all he knew of the habits of the different kinds of fishes: where, when and how best to catch them.
"'Should we not rather pray, father?' I asked him when I realised that our plight was desperate; we were like a couple of rabbits amidst a pack of white hounds which grinned at us on all sides.
"'God sees everything,' he said. 'If he sees everything He knows that men who were created for the land are now perishing in the sea, and that one of them, hoping to be saved, wishes to tell Him what he, the Father, already knows. It is not prayer but work that the earth and the people need. God understands that.'
"And having told me everything he knew about work my father began to talk about how one should live with others.
"'Is this the proper time to teach me?' said I. 'You did not do it when we were on shore.'
"'On shore I did not feel the proximity of death so.'
"The wind howled like a wild beast and furiously lashed the waves; my father had to shout to make me hear.
"'Always act as if there lived no one better and no one worse than yourself--that will always be right! A landowner and a fisherman, a priest and a soldier, belong to one body; you are needed just as much as any other of its members. Never approach a man with the idea that there is more bad in him than good; get to think that the good outweighs the bad and it will be so. People give what is asked of them.'"
"These things were not said all at once, of course, but intermittently, like words of command. We were tossed from wave to wave, and the words came to me sometimes from below, sometimes from above through the spray. Much of what he said was carried off before it reached my ear, much I could not understand: is it a time to learn, signor, when every minute you are threatened with death! I was in great fear; it was the first time that I had seen the sea in such a rage, and I felt utterly helpless. The sensation is still vivid in my memory, but I cannot tell whether I experienced it then or afterwards when I recalled those hours.