an obviously new ship, a ship with her reputation all to make yet
in the talk of the seamen who were to share their life with her.
Her name was already on their lips. I had heard it uttered between
two thick, red-necked fellows of the semi-nautical type at the
Fenchurch Street Railway-station, where, in those days, the
everyday male crowd was attired in jerseys and pilot-cloth mostly,
and had the air of being more conversant with the times of high-
water than with the times of the trains. I had noticed that new
ship's name on the first page of my morning paper. I had stared at
the unfamiliar grouping of its letters, blue on white ground, on
the advertisement-boards, whenever the train came to a standstill
alongside one of the shabby, wooden, wharf-like platforms of the
dock railway-line. She had been named, with proper observances, on
the day she came off the stocks, no doubt, but she was very far yet
from "having a name." Untried, ignorant of the ways of the sea,
she had been thrust amongst that renowned company of ships to load
for her maiden voyage. There was nothing to vouch for her
soundness and the worth of her character, but the reputation of the
building-yard whence she was launched headlong into the world of
waters. She looked modest to me. I imagined her diffident, lying
very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf to which
she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the company
of her tried and experienced sisters already familiar with all the
violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men. They had had
more long voyages to make their names in than she had known weeks
of carefully tended life, for a new ship receives as much attention
as if she were a young bride. Even crabbed old dock-masters look
at her with benevolent eyes. In her shyness at the threshold of a
laborious and uncertain life, where so much is expected of a ship,
she could not have been better heartened and comforted, had she