I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights. The
great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me. I had
been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. They
went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade
of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head sea
and bound for the gateway of Dover Straits. Singly, and in small
companies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless,
sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather roughly finished
mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away
there, below the grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam vessels have
reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one
reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe
into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port,
and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when
seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so
unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them
something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble
predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers,
conceited and without grace.
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