of unusual size chance to be wanted for a special
purpose, and they have to be made by hand. Side
by side with the subtle and facile machine, and
side by side with the fast-growing pile of oars on
the floor, a man shapes out these special oars with
an axe. Attended by no butterflies, and chipping
and dinting, by comparison as leisurely as if he
were a labouring Pagan getting them ready
against his decease at threescore and ten, to
take with him as a present to Charon for his
boat, the man (aged about thirty) plies his task.
The machine would make a regulation oar while
the man wipes his forehead. The man might be
buried in a mound made of the strips of thin
broad wooden ribbon torn from the wood whirled
into oars as the minutes fall from the clock, before
he had done a forenoon's work with his axe.

Passing from this wonderful sight to the Ships
again—for my heart, as to the Yard, is where
the ships are—I notice certain unfinished wooden
walls left seasoning on the stocks, pending the
solution of the merits of the wood and iron question,
and having an air of biding their time with
surly confidence. The names of these worthies are
set up beside them, together with their capacity
in guns—a custom highly conducive to ease and
satisfaction in social intercourse, if it could be
adapted to mankind. By a plank more gracefully
pendulous than substantial, I make bold to go
aboard a transport ship (iron screw) just sent in
from the contractor's yard to be inspected and
passed. She is a very gratifying experience, in
the simplicity and humanity of her arrangements
for troops, in her provision for light and air and
cleanliness, and in her care for women and children.
It occurs to me, as I explore her, that I
would require a handsome sum of money to go
aboard her, at midnight by the Dockyard bell, and
stay aboard alone till morning; for surely she must
be haunted by a crowd of ghosts of obstinate old
martinets, mournfully flapping their cherubic
epaulettes over the changed times. Though still
we may learn from the astounding ways and means
in our Yards now, more highly than ever to
respect the forefathers who got to sea, and fought
the sea, and held the sea, without them. This
remembrance putting me in the best of tempers with
an old hulk, very green as to her copper, and
generally dim and patched, I pull off my hat to her.
Which salutation a callow and downy-faced young
officer of Engineers, going by at the moment,
perceiving, appropriates—and to which he is most
heartily welcome, I am sure.

Having been torn to pieces (in imagination) by
the steam circular saws, perpendicular saws,
horizontal saws, and saws of eccentric action, I come
to the sauntering part of my expedition, and
consequently to the core of my Uncommercial pursuits.

Everywhere, as I saunter up and clown the
Yard, I meet with tokens of its quiet and retiring
character. There is a gravity upon its red brick
offices and houses, a staid pretence of having
nothing worth mentioning to do, an avoidance
of display, which I never saw out of England.
The white stones of the pavement present no
other trace of Achilles and his twelve hundred
banging men (not one of whom strikes an attitude)
than a few occasional echoes. But for a
whisper in the air suggestive of sawdust and
shavings, the oar-making and the saws of many
movements might be miles away. Down below
here, is the great reservoir of water where timber
is steeped in various temperatures, as a part of
its seasoning process. Above it, on a tramroad
supported by pillars, is a Chinese Enchanter's
Car, which fishes the logs up, when sufficiently
steeped, and rolls smoothly away with them to
stack them. When I was a child (the Yard being
then familiar to me) I used to think that I should
like to play at Chinese Enchanter, and to have
that apparatus placed at my disposal for the
purpose by a beneficent country. I still think that
I should rather like to try the effect of writing a
book in it. Its retirement is complete, and to
go gliding to and fro among the stacks of timber
would be a convenient kind of travelling in
foreign countries—among the forests of North
America, the sodden Honduras swamps, the dark
pine woods, the Norwegian frosts, and the tropical
heats, rainy seasons, and thunder-storms. The
costly store of timber is stacked and stowed away
in sequestered places, with the pervading avoidance
of flourish or effect. It makes as little of
itself as possible, and calls to no one "Come and
look at me!" And yet it is picked out from
the trees of the world; picked out for length,
picked out for breadth, picked out for straightness,
picked out for crookedness, chosen with an
eye to every need of ship and boat. Strangely
twisted pieces lie about, precious in the sight of
shipwrights. Sauntering through these groves,
I come upon an open glade where workmen are
examining some timber recently delivered. Quite
a pastoral scene, with a background of river and
windmill! and no more like War than the American
States are like an Union.

Sauntering among the ropemaking, I am spun
into a state of blissful indolence, wherein my rope
of life seems to be so untwisted by the process
as that I can see back to very early days indeed,
when my bad dreams—they were frightful, though
my more mature understanding has never made
out why—were of an interminable sort of
ropemaking, with long minute filaments for strands,
which, when they were spun home together close
to my eyes, occasioned screaming. Next, I walk
among the quiet lofts of stores—of sails, spars,
rigging, ships' boats—determined to believe that
somebody in authority wears a girdle and bends
beneath the weight of a massive bunch of keys,
and that, when such a thing is wanted, he comes
telling his keys like Blue Beard, and opens such
a door. Impassive as the long lofts look, let
the electric battery send down the word, and the
shutters and doors shall fly open, and such a fleet
of armed ships, under steam and under sail, shall
burst forth as will charge the old Medway—where
the merry Stuart let the Dutch come, while his
not so merry sailors starved in the streets—with
something worth looking at to carry to the sea.