A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses,
has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the
sadness of a free spirit put under restraint. Chain cables and
stout ropes keep her bound to stone posts at the edge of a paved
shore, and a berthing-master, with brass buttons on his coat, walks
about like a weather-beaten and ruddy gaoler, casting jealous,
watchful glances upon the moorings that fetter a ship lying passive
and still and safe, as if lost in deep regrets of her days of
liberty and danger on the sea.

The swarm of renegades--dock-masters, berthing-masters, gatemen,
and such like--appear to nurse an immense distrust of the captive
ship's resignation. There never seem chains and ropes enough to
satisfy their minds concerned with the safe binding of free ships
to the strong, muddy, enslaved earth. "You had better put another
bight of a hawser astern, Mr. Mate," is the usual phrase in their
mouth. I brand them for renegades, because most of them have been
sailors in their time. As if the infirmities of old age--the gray
hair, the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and the knotted
veins of the hands--were the symptoms of moral poison, they prowl
about the quays with an underhand air of gloating over the broken
spirit of noble captives. They want more fenders, more breasting-
ropes; they want more springs, more shackles, more fetters; they
want to make ships with volatile souls as motionless as square
blocks of stone. They stand on the mud of pavements, these
degraded sea-dogs, with long lines of railway-trucks clanking their
couplings behind their backs, and run malevolent glances over your
ship from headgear to taffrail, only wishing to tyrannize over the
poor creature under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence and care.
Here and there cargo cranes looking like instruments of torture for