s, the great yards, that could
yet spread broad sails to the breeze, swing idly on untended braces,
trusses creaking a note of protest, sheet and lift chains clanking
dismally against the mast. Stout purchase blocks that once _chirrped_
in chorus to a seaman's chantey stand stiffened with disuse; idle rags
of fluttering sailcloth mar the tracery of spar and cordage; in every
listless rope, every disordered ratline, she flies a signal of
distress--a pennant of neglect.

Her decks, encumbered with harbour gear and tackle, are given over to
the rude hands of the longshoreman; a lumber yard for harbour refuse, a
dumping ground for the ashes of the bustling dock tugs. On the hatch
covers of her empty holds planks and stages are thrown aside, left as
when the last of the cargo was dragged from her; hoist ropes, frayed
and chafed to feather edges, swing from the yardarms; broken cargo
slings lie rotting in a mess of grain refuse. The work is done. There
is not a labourer's pay in her; the stevedores are gone ashore.

Though yet staunch and seaworthy, she stands condemned by modern
conditions: conditions that call for a haste she could never show, for
a burthen that she could never carry. But a short time, and her owners
(grown weary of waiting a chance charter at even the shadow of a
freight) may turn their thumbs down, and the old barque pass to her
doom. In happy case, she may yet remain afloat--a sheer hulk, drowsing
the tides away in some remote harbour, coal-hulking for her
steam-pressed successor.

And of her crew, the men who manned and steered her? Scattered afar on
seven seas, learning a new way of seafaring; turning the grip that had
held to a life aloft to the heft of a coalman's shovel, the deft
fingers that had fashioned a wondrous plan of stay and shroud to the
touch of winch valve and lever. Only an old man remains, a warden, in
keeping with the lowly state of his once trim barque. Too old
(conservative, may be) to start sea life anew, he has come to
shipkeeping--a not unpleasant way of life for an aged mariner, so that
he can sit on the hatch on fine nights, with a neighbourly dock
policeman or Customs watcher and talk of the sea as only he knows it.
And when his gossip has risen to go the rounds, what links to the chain
of memory may he not forge, casting his old eyes aloft to the gaunt
spars and their burden of useless sail? Who knows what kindly ghosts
of bygone shipmates walk with him in the ni