on a wide harbour, hill-enclosed. Only small
coasting craft were there, mostly ketches; but we had topsail schooners
also and barquantines, those ascending and aerial rigs that would be
flamboyant but for the transverse spars of the foremast, giving one who
scans them the proper apprehension of stability and poise.

To come upon a craft rigged so, though at her moorings and with sails
furled, her slender poles upspringing from the bright plane of a
brimming harbour, is to me as rare and sensational a delight as the
rediscovery, when idling with a book, of a favourite lyric. That when
she is at anchor; but to see her, all canvas set for light summer airs,
at exactly that distance where defects and harshness in her apparel
dissolve, but not so far away but the white feathers at her throat are
plain, is to exult in the knowledge that man once reached such
greatness that he imagined and created a thing which was consonant with
the stateliness of the slow ranging of great billows, and the soaring
density of white cumulus clouds, and with the brightness and compelling
mystery of the far horizon at sundown.

Some mornings, when breakfast-time came with the top of the tide, we
could look down on the plan of a deck beneath, with its appurtenances
and junk, casks, houses, pumps, and winches, rope and spare spars,
binnacle and wheel, perhaps a boat, the regular deck seams curving and
persisting under all. An old collier ketch she might be, with a name
perhaps as romantic as the _Mary Ann_; for the owners of these little
vessels delight to honour their lady relatives.

Away in mid-stream the _Mary Ann_ would seem but a trivial affair, no
match for the immensities about her, diminished by the vistas of shores
and beaches, and the hills. But seen close under our window you
understood why her men would match her, and think it no hardihood, with
gales and the assaults of ponderous seas. Her many timbers, so well
wrought as to appear, at a distance, a delicate and frail shape, are
really heavy. Even in so small a craft as a ketch they are massive
enough to surprise you into wondering at the cunning of shipwrights,
those artists who take gross lumps of intractable timber and metal, and
compel them to subtle mouldings and soft grace, to an image which we
know means life that moves in rhythmic loveliness.

Talk of the art of book and picture making! There is an old fellow I
met in this village who will take the ruins of a small forest,