inconsiderate trifle puts her off her stride. A certain
mysteriousness hangs around the quality of speed as it was
displayed by the old sailing-ships commanded by a competent seaman.
In those days the speed depended upon the seaman; therefore, apart
from the laws, rules, and regulations for the good preservation of
his cargo, he was careful of his loading,--or what is technically
called the trim of his ship. Some ships sailed fast on an even
keel, others had to be trimmed quite one foot by the stern, and I
have heard of a ship that gave her best speed on a wind when so
loaded as to float a couple of inches by the head.

I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam--a flat foreground
of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts
of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the
Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled
ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set
ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging
slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master
stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his
chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozen-in
up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the
waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line
of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs.
From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air
the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and
disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy
carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that
appeared no bigger than children.

I was, as the French say, biting my fists with impatience for that