fore a tense northerly breeze. Yet even to them her
form, in pure white with gilt fillet, might tell of no common obsequies.

For in every good ship the miracle of Galatea is renewed; and the
shipwright who sent this keel down the ways to her element surely beheld
the birth of a goddess. He still speaks of her with pride, but the
conditions of his work keep him a modest man; for he goes about it under
the concentred gaze of half a dozen old mariners hauled ashore, who haunt
his yard uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. Nor has the
language a word for their appalling candour. Often, admiring how
cheerfully he tolerates them, I have wondered what it would feel like to
compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen reviewers. But to him, as
to his critics, the ship was a framework only until the terrible moment
when with baptism she took life. Did he in the rapture, the brief ecstasy
of creation, realise that she had passed from him? Ere the local
artillery band had finished 'Rule Britannia,' and while his friends were
still shaking his hands and drinking to him, did he know his loss in his
triumph? His fate is to improve the world, not to possess; to chase
perfection, knowing that under the final mastering touch it must pass from
his hand; to lose his works and anchor himself upon the workmanship, the
immaterial function. For of art this is the cross and crown in one; and
he, modest man, was born to the sad eminence.

She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by something better. Like a
slave's her beautiful untaught body came to us; but it was we who gave
wings to her, and with wings a soul, and a law to its grace, and
discipline to its vital impulses. She is ours, too, by our gratitude,
since the delicate machine:

"Has like a woman given up its joy;"

And by memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we tempt, of
her sweet companionship through long days empty of annoyance--land left
behind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols of the
market-place, its sordid worries; the breast flung wide to the horizon,
swept by wholesome salt airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean!
Then it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without
effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no
answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter of
reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine--I think at
times that she