, over the piers, the tall red funnels of the
_Aquitania_. This is going to be great doings, said he to himself. O
Cunard Line funnels! What is there that so moves the heart?

Bowling Green, Esq., confesses that it is hard to put these minutes
into cold and calculated narrative. Among ships and seafaring
concerns his heart is too violently stirred to be quite _maitre de
soi_.

The club moved forward. Welcomed by the suave commissionaire of the
Cunard Line, it was invited to rise in the elevator. On the upper
floor of the pier the members ran to the windows. There lay the
_Aquitania_ at her pier. The members' hearts were stirred. Even the
doctor, himself a hardened man of the sea, showed a brilliant spark
of emotion behind his monocular attic window. A ship in dock--and
what a ship! A ship at a city pier, strange sight. It is like a lion
in a circus cage. She, the beauty, the lovely living creature of
open azure and great striding ranges of the sea, she that needs
horizons and planets for her fitting perspective, she that asks the
snow and silver at her irresistible stern, she that persecutes the
sunset across the purple curves of the longitudes--tied up stiff and
dead in the dull ditch of a dockway. The upward slope of that great
bow, it was never made to stand still against a dusty pier-end.

The club proceeded and found itself in a little eddy of pure
Scotland. The _Columbia_ was just in from Glasgow--had docked only
an hour before. The doctor became very Scots in a flash. "Aye,
bonny!" was his reply to every question asked him by Mr. Green, the
diligent secretary. The secretary was addressed as "lad." A hat now
became a "bonnet." The fine stiff speech of Glasgow was heard on
every side, for the passengers were streaming through the customs.
Yon were twa bonny wee brithers, aiblins ten years old, that came
marching off, with bare knees and ribbed woollen stockings and
little tweed jackets. O Scotland, Scotland, said our hairt! The wund
blaws snell frae the firth, whispered the secretary to himself,
keeking about, but had not the courage to utter it.

Here the secretary pauses on a point of delicacy. It was the purpose
of the club to visit Capt. David W. Bone of the _Columbia_, but the
captain is a modest man, and one knows not just how much of our
admiration of him and his ship he would care to see spread upon the
minutes. Were Mr. Green such a man as the captain, would he be
lowering himself to have any truck wi