Page:The Book of the Homeless (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916).djvu/168

 touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a seaway, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.

When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo-tanks carried tame lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there, and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the clouds.

I remained on deck till we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so over-lighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar, as a working implement, shall become presently as obsolete as the sail. The pilot boarded us in a motor dinghy. More and more is mankind reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels. Progress!

Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. And readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete man.

It was really a surprisingly small dinghy, and it ran to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance. Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe Lightship floated all dark and silent under its enormous, round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights.

Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace already spread for a flight away from the luckless shores of Europe. Our visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark over there, that the Elbe Lightship has been towed away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and