assed on the shore. A little girl stood in the bow with a bottle of
wine on a string. An engine tooted, cables creaked, and down the greased
way slid the ship, with a dip and a heave when she hit the water that made
big waves on either side and set the canoes to rocking madly, while the
crowd cheered and shouted. After the launching, the schooners were towed
out to sea, and down the coast, to be fitted elsewhere. We boys followed
them in canoes as far as the breakwater, and watched them disappear. Soon
their sails would be set, and they would join the white adventurers out
there on the world rim.

Where are they now, I wonder? Are they still buffeting the seas, or do they
lie moored and outmoded beside some green wharf, their days of usefulness
over? I remember hoping, as I watched them pass out to sea, that they would
not share the fate of the unknown craft which lay buried in the sands a
mile down the coast. It was said that she came ashore in the "Great Storm"
of 1814 (or thereabouts). Nothing was left of her in our day but her sturdy
ribs, which thrust up a few feet above the sand, outlining her shape, and
were only visible at low water. On a stormy day, when the seas were high, I
used to stand at the head of the beach and try to picture how she drove up
on the shore, shuddering deliciously as each great wave came pounding down
on all that was left of her oaken frame. When I read in the newspaper of a
wreck I thought of her, and I think of her to this day on such occasions,
thrusting up black and dripping ribs above the wet sands at low water, or
vanishing beneath the pounding foam of the breakers.

If you take the shore line train from Boston to New York, you pass through
a sleepy old town in Connecticut where a spur track with rusty rails runs
out to the wharves, and moored to these wharves are side-wheel steamers
which once plied the Sound. It served somebody's purpose or pocket better
to discontinue the line, and with its cessation and the cessation of work
in the ship yards close by, the old town passed into a state of salty
somnolence. The harbour is glassy and still, opening out to the blue waters
of the Sound. Still are the white steamers by the wharves, where once the
gang planks shook with the tread of feet and the rumble of baggage trucks.
Many a time, as the train paused at the station, I have watched the black
stacks for some hint of smoke, hoping against hope that I should see the
old ship move, and tur