had not already
been sent up. For the vessels that had been laid up all winter and
stripped of everything, they were getting out the gear from the lofts.
Everywhere it was topmasts being sent up, sails being dragged out,
stays swayed taut, halyards and sheets rove--an overhauling
generally. On the railways--Burnham's, Parkhurst's, and Tarr's--were
vessels having their bottoms scrubbed and painted and their topsides
lined out. And they all looked so handsome and smelt so fine with
their riggings being tarred, not with the smoky tar that people ashore
put on house-roofs, but the fine rich-smelling tar that goes into
vessels' rigging; and there was the black and dark sea-green paint for
the sides, with the gold or yellow or sometimes red stripe to mark the
run, and main and quarter rails being varnished.

And the seine-boats! If there is anything afloat that sets more
easily on the water than a seine-boat I never saw it, unless it
might be a birch-bark canoe--and who'd want to be caught out in a
blow in a canoe? The seine-boats all looked as natural as so many
sea-gulls--thirty-six or thirty-eight feet long, green or blue
bottoms to just above the waterline so that it would show, and above
that all clear white except for the blue or red or yellow or green
decorations that some skippers liked. And the seines that went
with them were coming in wagons from the net and twine factory,
tanned brown or tarred black and all ready to be hauled on to the
vessels' decks or stowed in the holds below, until the fleet
should be in among the mackerel to the south'ard--off Hatteras or
Cape May or somewhere down that way.

To feel all that and the rest of it--to walk to the tops of your shoes
in pine chips in the spar yards, to measure the lengths of booms and
gaffs for yourself if you weren't sure who were going to spread the
big mainsails, to go up in the sail-lofts and see the sailmakers,
bench after bench of them, making their needles and the long waxed
threads fly through the canvas that it seemed a pity wasn't to stay so
white forever--to see them spread the canvas out along the chalk lines
on the varnished floor, fixing leach and luff ropes to them and
putting the leather-bound cringles in, and putting them in too so
they'd stay, for by and by men's lives would depend on the way they
hung on--all that, railways, sail-lofts, vessels, boats, docks alive
with men jumping to their work--skippers, crews, carpenters, riggers,
lumpers,