When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and naked submission, their
tallness is brought best home even to the mind of a seaman. The
man who has looked upon his ship going over too far is made aware
of the preposterous tallness of a ship's spars. It seems
impossible but that those gilt trucks which one had to tilt one's
head back to see, now falling into the lower plane of vision, must
perforce hit the very edge of the horizon. Such an experience
gives you a better impression of the loftiness of your spars than
any amount of running aloft could do. And yet in my time the royal
yards of an average profitable ship were a good way up above her
decks.

No doubt a fair amount of climbing up iron ladders can be achieved
by an active man in a ship's engine-room, but I remember moments
when even to my supple limbs and pride of nimbleness the sailing-
ship's machinery seemed to reach up to the very stars.

For machinery it is, doing its work in perfect silence and with a
motionless grace, that seems to hide a capricious and not always
governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of
the earth. Not for it the unerring precision of steel moved by
white steam and living by red fire and fed with black coal. The
other seems to draw its strength from the very soul of the world,
its formidable ally, held to obedience by the frailest bonds, like
a fierce ghost captured in a snare of something even finer than
spun silk. For what is the array of the strongest ropes, the
tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of
the infinite, but thistle stalks, cobwebs and gossamer?