innocent-looking little barque with, as likely as not, a homely
woman's name--Ellen this or Annie that--upon her fine bows. But
this is generally the case with a discharged cargo. Once spread at
large over the quay, it looks the most impossible bulk to have all
come there out of that ship along-side.

They were quiet, serene nooks in the busy world of docks, these
basins where it has never been my good luck to get a berth after
some more or less arduous passage. But one could see at a glance
that men and ships were never hustled there. They were so quiet
that, remembering them well, one comes to doubt that they ever
existed--places of repose for tired ships to dream in, places of
meditation rather than work, where wicked ships--the cranky, the
lazy, the wet, the bad sea boats, the wild steerers, the
capricious, the pig-headed, the generally ungovernable--would have
full leisure to take count and repent of their sins, sorrowful and
naked, with their rent garments of sailcloth stripped off them, and
with the dust and ashes of the London atmosphere upon their
mastheads. For that the worst of ships would repent if she were
ever given time I make no doubt. I have known too many of them.
No ship is wholly bad; and now that their bodies that had braved so
many tempests have been blown off the face of the sea by a puff of
steam, the evil and the good together into the limbo of things that
have served their time, there can be no harm in affirming that in
these vanished generations of willing servants there never has been
one utterly unredeemable soul.

In the New South Dock there was certainly no time for remorse,
introspection, repentance, or any phenomena of inner life either
for the captive ships or for their officers. From six in the