has found a more human language. Who that has ever steered
for hours together cannot report of a mysterious voice 'breaking the
silence of the seas,' as though a friend were standing and speaking
astern? or has not turned his head to the confident inexplicable call?
The fishermen fable of drowned sailors 'hailing their names.' But the
voice is of a single speaker; it bears no likeness to the hollow tones of
the dead; it calls no name; it utters no particular word. It merely
speaks. Sometimes, ashamed at being tricked by an illusion so absurd,
I steal a glance at the yachtsman forward. He is smoking, placidly
staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the speaker, and patently he
has heard nothing. Was it Cynthia, my dearer shipmate? She, too, knows
the voice; even answered it one day, supposing it mine, and in her
confusion I surprised our common secret. But we never hear it together.
She is seated now on the lee side of the cockpit, her hands folded on the
coaming, her chin rested on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath the sail
and across the sea from which they surely have drawn their wine-coloured
glooms. She has not stirred for many minutes. No, it was not Cynthia.
Then either it must be the wild, obedient spirit who carries us, straining
at the impassable bar of speech, to break through and be at one with her
master, or else--Can it have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds,
with mischievous harp?

"That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew,
The farther going more to dwell
And wing our green to wed our blue;
But whether note of joy or knell
Not his own Father-singer knew;
Nor yet can any mortal tell,
Save only how it shivers through;
The breast of us a sounded shell,
The blood of us a lighted dew."

Perhaps; but for my part I believe it was the ship; and if you deride my
belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind
them of a vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain romance in
figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say
idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they
kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly
adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true
personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a
sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. La