young in spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with
understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the
immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of
ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.

From a distance of years, looking at the remembered aspects of the
storms lived through, it is that impression which disengages itself
clearly from the great body of impressions left by many years of
intimate contact.

If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a
storm. The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows
upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about
and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an
appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as
though it had been created before light itself.

Looking back after much love and much trouble, the instinct of
primitive man, who seeks to personify the forces of Nature for his
affection and for his fear, is awakened again in the breast of one
civilized beyond that stage even in his infancy. One seems to have
known gales as enemies, and even as enemies one embraces them in
that affectionate regret which clings to the past.

Gales have their personalities, and, after all, perhaps it is not
strange; for, when all is said and done, they are adversaries whose
wiles you must defeat, whose violence you must resist, and yet with
whom you must live in the intimacies of nights and days.

Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a