Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like.  He had come off a training ship, the mate told me, and this was his first voyage to sea.  His face was keen-cut, alert, as were his bodily movements, and he wore sailor-appearing clothes with sailor-seeming grace.  In fact, as I was to learn, he was to be the only sailor-seeming creature fore and aft.

The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any moment, the mate vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy.  Those already on board were the miscellaneous ones who had shipped themselves in New York without the mediation of boarding-house masters.  And what the crew itself would be like God alone could tell—so said the mate.  Shorty, the Japanese (or Malay) and Italian half-caste, the mate told me, was an able seaman, though he had come out of steam and this was his first sailing voyage.

“Ordinary seamen!” Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question.  “We don’t carry Landsmen!—forget it!  Every clodhopper an’ cow-walloper these days is an able seaman.  That’s the way they rank and are paid.  The merchant service is all shot to hell.  There ain’t no more sailors.  They all died years ago, before you were born even.”

I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate’s breath.  Yet he did not stagger nor show any signs of intoxication.  Not until afterward was I to know that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was where the liquor gave him away.

“It’d a-ben a grace had I died years ago,” he said, “rather than to a-lived to see sailors an’ ships pass away from the sea.”

“But I understand the Elsinore is considered one of the finest,” I urged.

“So she is . . . to-day.  But what is she?—a damned cargo-carrier.  She ain’t built for sailin’,