forces
predominating, cause universal diffusion--alternate eras of
Evolution and Dissolution. AND THUS THERE IS SUGGESTED THE
CONCEPTION OF A PAST DURING WHICH THERE HAVE BEEN SUCCESSIVE
EVOLUTIONS ANALOGOUS TO THAT WHICH IS NOW GOING ON; A FUTURE
DURING WHICH SUCCESSIVE OTHER EVOLUTIONS MAY GO ON--EVER THE SAME
IN PRINCIPLE BUT NEVER THE SAME IN CONCRETE RESULT."


That is it--the most we know--alternate eras of evolution and
dissolution. In the past there have been other evolutions similar
to that one in which we live, and in the future there may be other
similar evolutions--that is all. The principle of all these
evolutions remains, but the concrete results are never twice
alike. Man was not; he was; and again he will not be. In
eternity which is beyond our comprehension, the particular
evolution of that solar satellite we call the "Earth" occupied but
a slight fraction of time. And of that fraction of time man
occupies but a small portion. All the whole human drift, from the
first ape-man to the last savant, is but a phantom, a flash of
light and a flutter of movement across the infinite face of the
starry night.

When the thermometer drops, man ceases--with all his lusts and
wrestlings and achievements; with all his race-adventures and
race-tragedies; and with all his red killings, billions upon
billions of human lives multiplied by as many billions more. This
is the last word of Science, unless there be some further,
unguessed word which Science will some day find and utter. In the
meantime it sees no farther than the starry void, where the
"fleeting systems lapse like foam." Of what ledger-account is the
tiny life of man in a vastness where stars snuff out like candles
and great suns blaze for a time-tick of eternity and are gone?

And for us who live, no worse can happen than has happened to the
earliest drifts of man, marked to-day by ruined cities of
forgotten civilisation--ruined cities, which, on excavation, are
found to rest on ruins of earlier cities, city upon city, and
fourteen cities, down to a stratum where, still earlier, wandering
herdsmen drove their flocks, and where, even preceding them, wild
hunters chased their prey long after the cave-man and the man of
the squatting-place cracked the knuckle-bones of wild animals and
vanished from the earth. There is nothing terrible about it.
With Richard Hovey, when he faced his death, we can say: "Behold!
I have lived!" And with another and greater one, we can lay
ourselves down with a will. The one drop of living, the one taste
of being, has been good; and perhaps our greatest achievement will
be that we dreamed immortality, even though we failed to realise
it.



SMALL-BOAT SAILING



A sailor is born, not made. And by "sailor" is meant, not the
average efficient and hopeless creature who is found to-day in the
forecastle of deepwater ships, but the man who will take a fabric
compounded of wood and iron and rope and canvas and compel it to
obey his will on the surface of the sea. Barring captains and
mates of big ships, the small-boat sailor is the real sailor. He
knows--he must know--how to make the wind carry his craft from one
given point to another given point. He must know about tides and
rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and day and night
signals; he must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be
sympathetically familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat
which differentiate it from every other boat that was ever built
and rigged. He must know how to gentle her about, as one instance
of a myriad, and to fill her on the other tack without deadening
her way or allowing her to fall off too far.

The deepwater sailor of to-day needs know none of these things.
And he doesn't. He pulls and hauls as he is ordered, swabs decks,
washes paint, and chips iron-rust. He knows nothing, and cares
less. Put him in a small boat and he is helpless. He will cut an
even better figure on the hurricane deck of a horse.

I shall never forget my child-astonishment when I first
encountered one of these strange beings. He was a runaway English
sailor. I was a lad of twelve, with a decked-over, fourteen-foot,
centre-board skiff which I had taught myself to sail. I sat at
his feet as at the feet of a god, while he discoursed of strange
lands and peoples, deeds of violence, and hair-raising gales at
sea. Then, one day, I took him for a sail. With all the
trepidation of the veriest little amateur, I hoisted sail and got
under way. Here was a man, looking on critically, I was sure, who
knew more in one second about boats and the water than I could
ever know. After an interval, in which I exceeded myself, he took
the tiller and the sheet. I sat on the little thwart amidships,
open-mouthed, prepared to learn what real sailing was. My mouth
remained open, for I learned what a real sailor was in a small
boat. He couldn't trim the sheet to save himself, he nearly
capsized several times in squalls, and, once again, by
blunderingly jibing over; he didn't know what a centre-board was
for, nor did he know that in running a boat before the wind one
must sit in the middle instead of on the side; and finally, when
we came back to the wharf, he ran the skiff in full tilt,
shattering her nose and carrying away the mast-step. And yet he
was a really truly sailor fresh from the vasty deep.

Which points my moral. A man can sail in the forecastles of big
ships all his life and never know what real sailing is. From the
time I was twelve, I listened to the lure of the sea. When I was
fifteen I was captain and owner of an oyster-pirate sloop. By the
time I was sixteen I was sailing in scow-schooners, fishing salmon
with the Greeks up the Sacramento River, and serving as sailor on
the Fish Patrol. And I was a good sailor, too, though all my
cruising had been on San Francisco Bay and the rivers tributary to
it. I had never been on the ocean in my life.

Then, the month I was seventeen, I signed before the mast as an
able seaman on a three-top-mast schooner bound on a seven-months'
cruise across the Pacific and back again. As my shipmates
promptly informed me, I had had my nerve with me to sign on as
able seaman. Yet behold, I WAS an able seaman. I had graduated
from the right school. It took no more than minutes to learn the
names and uses of the few new ropes. It was simple. I did not do
things blindly. As a small-boat sailor I had learned to reason
out and know the WHY of everything. It is true, I had to learn
how to steer by compass, which took maybe half a minute; but when
it came to steering "full-and-by" and "close-and-by," I could beat
the average of my shipmates, because that was the very way I had
always sailed. Inside fifteen minutes I could box the compass
around and back again. And there was little else to learn during
that seven-months' cruise, except fancy rope-sailorising, such as
the more complicated lanyard knots and the making of various kinds
of sennit and rope-mats. The point of all of which is that it is
by means of small-boat sailing that the real sailor is best
schooled.

And if a man is a born sailor, and has gone to the school of the
sea, never in all his life can he get away from the sea again.
The salt of it is in his bones as well as his nostrils, and the
sea will call to him until he dies. Of late years, I have found
easier ways of earning a living. I have quit the forecastle for
keeps, but always I come back to the sea. In my case it is
usually San Francisco Bay, than which no lustier, tougher, sheet
of water can be found for small-boat sailing.

It really blows on San Francisco Bay. During the winter, which is
the best cruising season, we have southeasters, southwesters, and
occasional howling northers. Throughout the summer we have what
we call the "sea-breeze," an unfailing wind off the Pacific that
on most afternoons in the week blows what the Atlantic Coast
yachtsmen would name a gale. They are always surprised by the
small spread of canvas our yachts carry. Some of them, with
schooners they have sailed around the Horn, have looked proudly at
their own lofty sticks and huge spreads, then patronisingly and
even pityingly at ours. Then, perchance, they have joined in a
club cruise from San Francisco to Mare Island. They found

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