The Last Moorings. 119 
sometimes the vessel turns on her beam-ends with a 
too ponderous and ill-built load of straw, and then 
the wreck lies right in the fairway of all the ships 
coming up the channel. To load a waggon success- 
fully is indeed a work of art: on the hills where the 
waggons have to run ‘sidelong’ to pick up the crops, 
one side higher than the other, no one but an ex- 
perienced hand can make the stuff stay on. Then 
there is often a tremendous bumping and scraping of 
the keel on the rocks of the newly-mended roads, and 
the nasty chopping seas of the deep ruts, besides the 
long regular Atlantic swells of the furrows and 
“lands” So that the cargo had need to be firmly 
placed in the hold. 
Every now and then she goes into dock and gets 
a new streak of paint and a thorough overhauling. 
The running rigging of the harness has to be polished 
and kept in good condition, and the crew are rarely 
idle if the captain knows his business. You should 
never let your ‘fo’castle’ hands loll about; the 
proverb about the and the idle hands is notori- 
ously true aboard ship, and in the stables. 
How many a man’s life has centred about the 
waggon! As a child he rides in it as a treat to the 
hay-field with his father; as a lad he walks beside 
the leader, and gets his first ideas of the great world 
when they visit the market town. As a man he 
takes command and pilots the ship for many a long, 
long year. When he marries, the waggon, lent for 
