Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/309

 ABOUT ALL KINDS OF SHIPS

little steamer had seventy passengers, and a crew of forty men, and seemed a good deal of a beehive. But in this present ship we are living in a sort of solitude, these soft summer days, with sometimes a hundred passengers scattered about the spacious distances, and sometimes nobody in sight at all; yet, hidden somewhere in the vessel s bulk, there are (including crew) near eleven hundred people.

The stateliest lines in the literature of the sea are these :

Britannia needs no bulwarks, no towers along the steep Her march is o er the mountain waves, her home is on the deep !

There it is. In those old times the little ships climbed over the waves and wallowed down into the trough on the other side; the giant ship of our day does not climb over the waves, but crushes her way through them. Her formidable weight and mass and impetus give her mastery over any but extraordinary storm waves.

The ingenuity of man! I mean in this passing generation. To-day I found in the chart-room a frame of removable wooden slats on the wall, and on the slats was painted uninforming information like this

Trim-Tank Empty

Double-Bottom No. i Full

Double-Bottom No. 2 Full

Double-Bottom No. 3 Full

Double-Bottom No. 4 Full

While I was trying to think out what kind of a game this might be and how a stranger might best

�� �