e standard-breds, whose pinions
sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and
canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the
distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders
with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a
suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.

Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the
wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments
of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time
into certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the
self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist
before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the
presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to
common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the
spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory,
they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or
crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the
flight of geese gave me--a throb from the ancient and perennial romance
of the soul.

Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge
is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many
think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of
the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a
derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old
fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after
that--galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some
time _really_ to go to sea.

Sing the song of steam--the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet.
Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking
its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven
hydroplanes--some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back
on the crowd, and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old
steamer--emotions which defy mere brain and scorn the upstart
memory--will catch the coherent story of it all, and his expression will
be the song of steam. For the pangs and passions of the Soul can only
become articulate at the touch of some ancient reminder, which erects a
magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to flood in the
stillness of that larger time, whose crises