oats seem to be building themselves.

Some of the men got out of the cars and ran along the tracks,
asking each other how boats could be built off in the grass like
this. Lieutenant Claude Wheeler stretched his legs upon the
opposite seat and sat still at his window, looking down on this
strange scene. Shipbuilding, he had supposed, meant noise and
forges and engines and hosts of men. This was like a dream.
Nothing but green meadows, soft grey water, a floating haze of
mist a little rosy from the sinking sun, spectre-like seagulls,
flying slowly, with the red glow tinging their wings--and those
four hulls lying in their braces, facing the sea, deliberating by
the sea.

Claude knew nothing of ships or shipbuilding, but these craft did
not seem to be nailed together,--they seemed all of a piece, like
sculpture. They reminded him of the houses not made with hands;
they were like simple and great thoughts, like purposes forming
slowly here in the silence beside an unruffled arm of the
Atlantic. He knew nothing about ships, but he didn't have to; the
shape of those hulls--their strong, inevitable lines--told their
story, WAS their story; told the whole adventure of man with the
sea.

Wooden ships! When great passions and great aspirations stirred a
country, shapes like these formed along its shores to be the
sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or
read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden
bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act,
they were the "going over," the drawn arrow, the great unuttered
cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow!...

The locomotive screeched to her scattered passengers, like an old
turkey-hen calling her brood. The soldier boys came running back
along the embankment and leaped aboard the train. The conductor
shouted they would be in Hoboken in time for supper.

II

It was midnight when the men had got their supper and began
unrolling their blankets to sleep on the floor of the long dock
waiting-rooms,--which in other days had been thronged by people
who came to welcome home-coming friends, or to bid them God-speed
to foreign shores. Claude and some of his men had tried to look
about them; but there was little to be seen. The bow of a boat,
painted in distracting patterns of black and white, rose at one
end of the shed, but the water itself was not visible. Down in
the cobble-paved street below they watched for awhile the