Rudyard Kipling 125 she wants to sympathize with you and help you in your work, and everything else that clearly a man must do for himself. Then she sends round five notes a day to ask why the dickens you haven’t been wasting your time with her.” “Don’t generalize,” said the Nilghai. “By the time you arrive at five notes a day you must have gone through a good deal and behaved accordingly. Shouldn’t begin these things, my son.” “I shouldn’t have gone down to the sea,” said Dick, just a little anxious to change the conversation. “And you shouldn’t have sung.” “The sea isn’t sending you five notes a day,” said the Nilghai. “No, but I’m fatally compromised. She’s an enduring old hag, and I’m sorry I ever met her. Why wasn’t I born and bred and dead in a three-pair back?” “Hear him blaspheming his first love! Why in the world shouldn’t you listen to her?” said Torpenhow. Before Dick could reply the Nilghai lifted up his voice with a shout that shook the windows, in “The Men of the Sea,” that begins, as all know, “The sea is a wicked old woman,” and after rading through eight lines whose imagery is truthful, ends in a refrain, slow as the clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars where the men sweat and tramp in the shingle. “Ye that bore us, O restore us! She is kinder than ye; For the call is on our heart-strings!’ Said The Men of the Sea.” The Nilghai sang that verse twice, with simple cunning, intending that Dick should hear. But Dick was waiting for the farewell of the men to their wives.