o much more.
Ah! but suddenly the thought occurs, suppose that the defect of
hearing, as of tongue, were liable to be loosed by an overmastering
emotion, and that by startling him with your hoarded confidence you
were to break the spell! The hint is too perilous; let us row away.

A few strokes take us to the half-submerged wreck of a lime-schooner
that was cut to the water's edge, by a collision in a gale, twelve
months ago. The water kindled the lime, the cable was cut, the vessel
drifted ashore and sunk, still blazing, at this little beach. When I
saw her, at sunset, the masts had been cut away, and the flames held
possession on board. Fire was working away in the cabin, like a live
thing, and sometimes glared out of the hatchway; anon it clambered
along the gunwale, like a school-boy playing, and the waves chased it
as in play; just a flicker of flame, then a wave would reach up to
overtake it; then the flames would be, or seem to be, where the water
had been; and finally, as the vessel lay careened, the waves took
undisturbed possession of the lower gunwale, and the flames of the
upper. So it burned that day and night; part red with fire, part black
with soaking; and now twelve months have made all its visible parts
look dry and white, till it is hard to believe that either fire or
water has ever touched it. It lies over on its bare knees, and a single
knee, torn from the others, rests imploringly on the shore, as if that
had worked its way to land, and perished in act of thanksgiving. At low
tide, one half the frame is lifted high in air, like a dead tree in the
forest.

Perhaps all other elements are tenderer in their dealings with what is
intrusted to them than is the air. Fire, at least, destroys what it has
ruined; earth is warm and loving, and it moreover conceals; water is at
least caressing,--it laps the greater part of this wreck with
protecting waves, covers with sea-weeds all that it can reach, and
protects with incrusting shells. Even beyond its grasp it tosses soft
pendants of moss that twine like vine-tendrils, or sway in the wind. It
mellows harsh colors into beauty, and Ruskin grows eloquent over the
wave-washed tint of some tarry, weather-beaten boat. But air is
pitiless: it dries and stiffens all outline, and bleaches all color
away, so that you can hardly tell whether these ribs belonged to a ship
or an elephant; and yet there is a certain cold purity in the shapes it
leaves, and the birds it s