mocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks before, their expert share in
forwarding the work we had given them in this new age; and then where
were they? Ships I knew, but not such ships as these, nor such work.

Another officer joined us, an older man, and said this to him was
strange navigation. He was a merchant seaman. He had served his time
in sailing ships. I asked him to name some of them, having the feeling
that I could get back to the time I knew if I could but hail the ghost,
with another survivor from the past, of one of those forgotten ships.
"Well," he replied, "there was the _Cutty Sark_."

If he had said the _Golden Hind_ I should not have been more
astonished. In a sense, it was the same thing. The _Cutty Sark_ was
in the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, but at the end. That
era, though it closed so recently, was already as far as a vague
memory. The new sea engines had come, and here we were with them,
puzzled and embarrassed, having lost our reasonable friends. I told
him I had known the _Cutty Sark_, and had seen that master of hers--a
character who went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap--who gave one of her
masts (the mizzen, I think) a golden rooster, after he had driven her
from Sydney Heads to the Channel to break the record--Captain Woodget.
His men said it was like living in a glass house.

I recalled to him that once, when my business was concerned with bills
of lading and freight accounts, I was advised to ship four hundred
cases to Sydney, New South Wales; and one-half of that consignment, my
instructions ran, was to arrive a month before the other. The first
lot went in a modern steel barque, the _Cairnbulg_. ("I have seen
her," said this submarine officer). More than a fortnight later, being
too young to remember that the little _Cutty Sark_ had been one of the