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By this time we could see the cove and its rocky edges, upon which the rickety fish-houses and flakes were insecurely perched on slender stilts. A couple of blunt-bowed little schooners were at anchor, and some men in boats were catching squid for bait. "This is picturesque enough," said Miss Jelliffe, "but I miss the beauty of all that we have just left."
Still, he toiled upon the seas, in his own way, much as a shopkeeper works behind his counter. And his ship was the means by which he maintained his growing family. She was a heavy, strong, blunt-bowed affair, awakening the ideas of primitive solidity, like the wooden plough of our forefathers. And there were, about her, other suggestions of a rustic and homely nature.
Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal basin, but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type.
Now that vessel was not dead. She was a good vessel, a sound vessel, even a handsome vessel, in her blunt-bowed, coastwise way. She sailed under four lowers across as blue and glittering a sea as I have ever known, and there was not a point in her sailing that one could lay a finger upon as wrong. And yet, passing that schooner at two miles, one knew, somehow, that no hand was on her wheel.
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