n, and go about her rightful seafaring. But it was
never to be. There were only ghosts in engine room and pilot house. Like
the abandoned dwelling on the upland road to Monterey, these steamers were
mute witnesses to a vanished order. But always as the train pulled out from
the station I sat on the rear platform and watched the white town and the
white steamers and the glassy harbour slip backward into the haze--and it
seemed as if that haze was the gentle breath of oblivion.

I live inland now, far from the smell of salt water and the sight of sails.
Yet sometimes there comes over me a longing for the sea as irresistible as
the lust for salt which stampedes the reindeer of the north. I must gaze on
the unbroken world-rim, I must feel the sting of spray, I must hear the
rhythmic crash and roar of breakers and watch the sea-weed rise and fall
where the green waves lift against the rocks. Once in so often I must ride
those waves with cleated sheet and tugging tiller, and hear the soft
hissing song of the water on the rail. And "my day of mercy" is not
complete till I have seen some old boat, her seafaring done, heeled over on
the beach or amid the fragrant sedges, a mute and wistful witness to the
romance of the deep, the blue and restless deep where man has adventured in
craft his hands have made since the earliest sun of history, and whereon he
will adventure, ardently and insecure, till the last syllable of recorded
time.

ZEPPELINITIS[26]

PHILIP LITTELL

[Footnote 26: Reprinted by permission from _Books and Things_, by Philip
Littell. Copyright 1919, by Harcourt, Brace and Howe, Inc.]

Much reading of interviews with returning travellers who had almost seen
Zeppelins over London, and of wireless messages from other travellers who
had come even nearer seeing the great sight, had made me, I suppose,
morbidly desirous of escape from a city where other such travellers were
presumably at large. However that may be, when Mrs. Watkin asked me to
spend Sunday at her place in the country, I broke an old habit and said I'd
go. When last I had visited her house she worshipped success in the arts,
and her recipe was to have a few successes to talk and a lot of us
unsuccessful persons to listen. At that time her aesthetic was easy to
understand. "Every great statue," she said, "is set up in a public place.
Every great picture brings a high price. Every great book has a large sale.
That is what greatness in art means."