re wont to deal very tenderly with these wharves. In
summer the sea decks them with floating weeds, and studs them with an
armor of shells. In the winter it surrounds them with a smoother mail
of ice, and the detached piles stand white and gleaming, like the
out-door palace of a Russian queen. How softly and eagerly this coming
tide swirls round them! All day the fishes haunt their shadows; all
night the phosphorescent water glimmers by them, and washes with long,
refluent waves along their sides, decking their blackness with a spray
of stars.

Water seems the natural outlet and discharge for every landscape, and
when we have followed down this artificial promontory, a wharf, and
have seen the waves on three sides of us, we have taken the first step
toward circumnavigating the globe. This is our last terra firma. One
step farther, and there is no possible foothold but a deck, which tilts
and totters beneath our feet. A wharf, therefore, is properly neutral
ground for all. It is a silent hospitality, understood by all nations.
It is in some sort a thing of universal ownership. Having once built
it, you must grant its use to everyone; it is no trespass to land upon
any man's wharf.

The sea, like other beautiful savage creatures, derives most of its
charm from its reserves of untamed power. When a wild animal is subdued
to abjectness, all its interest is gone. The ocean is never thus
humiliated. So slight an advance of its waves would overwhelm us, if
only the restraining power once should fail, and the water keep on
rising! Even here, in these safe haunts of commerce, we deal with the
same salt tide which I myself have seen ascend above these piers, and
which within half a century drowned a whole family in their home upon
our Long Wharf.

It is still the same ungoverned ocean which, twice in every twenty-four
hours, reasserts its right of way, and stops only where it will. At
Monckton, on the Bay of Fundy, the wharves are built forty feet high,
and at ebb-tide you may look down on the schooners lying aground upon
the mud below. In six hours they will be floating at your side. But the
motions of the tide are as resistless whether its rise be six feet or
forty; as in the lazy stretching of the caged lion's paw you can see
all the terrors of his spring.

Our principal wharf, the oldest in the town, has lately been doubled in
size, and quite transformed in shape, by an importation of broad acres
from the country. It is