rious doings of this new age, I thought as I listened to him,
would have just the same interest for me as the relics of an extinct
race of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of the
monstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now. That made an
acute difference. This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, but
actuality. And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he was
like the men of that group on the _Queen Mary_ who were similarly
mocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks before, their expert share in
forwarding the work we had given them in this new age; and then where
were they? Ships I knew, but not such ships as these, nor such work.

Another officer joined us, an older man, and said this to him was
strange navigation. He was a merchant seaman. He had served his time
in sailing ships. I asked him to name some of them, having the feeling
that I could get back to the time I knew if I could but hail the ghost,
with another survivor from the past, of one of those forgotten ships.
"Well," he replied, "there was the _Cutty Sark_."

If he had said the _Golden Hind_ I should not have been more
astonished. In a sense, it was the same thing. The _Cutty Sark_ was
in the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, but at the end. That
era, though it closed so recently, was already as far as a vague
memory. The new sea engines had come, and here we were with them,
puzzled and embarrassed, having lost our reasonable friends. I told
him I had known the _Cutty Sark_, and had seen that master of hers--a
character who went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap--who gave one of her
masts (the mizzen, I think) a golden rooster, after he had driven her
from Sydney Heads to the Channel to break the record--Captain Woodget.
His men said it was like living in a glass house.

I recalled to him that once, when my business was concerned with bills
of lading and freight accounts, I was advised to ship four hundred
cases to Sydney, New South Wales; and one-half of that consignment, my
instructions ran, was to arrive a month before the other. The first
lot went in a modern steel barque, the _Cairnbulg_. ("I have seen
her," said this submarine officer). More than a fortnight later, being
too young to remember that the little _Cutty Sark_ had been one of the
China tea clippers, I shipped the last half of the consignment in her.
But she disordered all the careful plans of the consignees. She got in
a fortnigh