The Mirror of the Sea

follow this writing have counted in their time over a hundred sail becalmed, as if within a magic ring, not very far from the Azores - ships more or less tall. There were hardly two

ery blue on a pale sea, they all went in the same direction together. For this was the homeward-bound fleet from the far-off ends of the earth, and a Falmouth fruit-sch

agic ring of the horizon. The spell of the fair wind has a subtle power to scatter a white-winged company of ships looking all the same way, each wit

ding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare for catching the invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from the water, sail after s

e ship's motive-power, as it were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man; and it is the ship's tal

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

in a ship's engine-room, but I remember moments when even to my supple limbs and p

n 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