take
pine boles, metal, cordage, and canvas, and without plans, but from the
ideal in his eye, build you the kind of lithe and dainty schooner that,
with the cadences of her sheer and moulding, and the soaring of her
masts, would keep you by her side all day in harbour; build you the
kind of girded, braced, and immaculate vessel, sound at every point,
tuned and sweet to a precision that in a violin would make a musician
flush with inspiration, a ship to ride, lissom and light, the uplifted
western ocean, and to resist the violence of vaulting seas and the
drive of hurricane. She will ride out of the storm afterwards, none to
applaud her, over the mobile hills travelling express, the rags of her
sails triumphant pennants in the gale, the beaten seas pouring from her
deck.

He, that modest old man, can create such a being as that; and I have
heard visitors to this village, leisured and cultured folk, whose own
creative abilities amount to no more than the arranging of some
decorative art in strata of merit, talk down to the old fellow who can
think out a vessel like that after supper, and go out after breakfast
to direct the laying of her keel--talk down to him, kindly enough, of
course, and smilingly, as a "working man."

I told you there were two of us, at this inn. We met at meals. I think
he was a commercial traveller. A tall young fellow, strongly built, a
pleasure to look at; carefully dressed, intelligent, with hard and
clear grey eyes. He had a ruddy but fastidious complexion, though he
was, I noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swift
in his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he could
come to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. He
had no moments of laxity and hesitation, even after a breakfast, on a
hot morning, too, of ham and eggs drenched in coffee. He made me feel
an ineffective, delicate, and inferior being.

He would bang out to business, after breakfast and a breezy chat with
me; and I lapsed, a lazy and shameless idler, into the window, to
wonder among the models outside, the fascinating curves of ships and
boats, as satisfying and as personal to me as music I know, as the lilt
of ballads and all that minor rhythm which wheels within the enclosing
harmonies and balance of stars and suns in their orbits. Those forms of
ships and boats are as satisfying as the lines which make the strength
and swiftness of salmon and dolphins, and the ease of