the roofs. The least puff of wind stealing round the corners of
the dock buildings stirs these captives fettered to rigid shores.
It is as if the soul of a ship were impatient of confinement.
Those masted hulls, relieved of their cargo, become restless at the
slightest hint of the wind's freedom. However tightly moored, they
range a little at their berths, swaying imperceptibly the spire-
like assemblages of cordage and spars. You can detect their
impatience by watching the sway of the mastheads against the
motionless, the soulless gravity of mortar and stones. As you pass
alongside each hopeless prisoner chained to the quay, the slight
grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes a sound of angry
muttering. But, after all, it may be good for ships to go through
a period of restraint and repose, as the restraint and self-
communion of inactivity may be good for an unruly soul--not,
indeed, that I mean to say that ships are unruly; on the contrary,
they are faithful creatures, as so many men can testify. And
faithfulness is a great restraint, the strongest bond laid upon the
self-will of men and ships on this globe of land and sea.

This interval of bondage in the docks rounds each period of a
ship's life with the sense of accomplished duty, of an effectively
played part in the work of the world. The dock is the scene of
what the world would think the most serious part in the light,
bounding, swaying life of a ship. But there are docks and docks.
The ugliness of some docks is appalling. Wild horses would not
drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow
estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a
nightmare of dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are
studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures,
whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty