with a mighty sigh, brings me to the remark that in order to take a
proper care of a ship's spars it is just as well for a seaman to
have nothing the matter with his ears. Such is the intimacy with
which a seaman had to live with his ship of yesterday that his
senses were like her senses, that the stress upon his body made him
judge of the strain upon the ship's masts.

I had been some time at sea before I became aware of the fact that
hearing plays a perceptible part in gauging the force of the wind.
It was at night. The ship was one of those iron wool-clippers that
the Clyde had floated out in swarms upon the world during the
seventh decade of the last century. It was a fine period in ship-
building, and also, I might say, a period of over-masting. The
spars rigged up on the narrow hulls were indeed tall then, and the
ship of which I think, with her coloured-glass skylight ends
bearing the motto, "Let Glasgow Flourish," was certainly one of the
most heavily-sparred specimens. She was built for hard driving,
and unquestionably she got all the driving she could stand. Our
captain was a man famous for the quick passages he had been used to
make in the old Tweed, a ship famous the world over for her speed.
The Tweed had been a wooden vessel, and he brought the tradition of
quick passages with him into the iron clipper. I was the junior in
her, a third mate, keeping watch with the chief officer; and it was
just during one of the night watches in a strong, freshening breeze
that I overheard two men in a sheltered nook of the main deck
exchanging these informing remarks. Said one:

"Should think 'twas time some of them light sails were coming off
her."