A SHIP OF BY ELEANOR MORDAUNT AUTHOR OF 'THE GARDEN OF CONTENTMENT' 1911 · LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 1911 A SHIP OF SOLACE CHAPTER I "Tell me, ye naturalists, who first sounded the first march and retreat of the tides. Hither shalt thou come and no further-why doth not the water recover his right over the earth, being higher in Nature? Whence came the salt and who boiled it to make so much brine ? When the winds are not only wild in a storm but stark mad in a hurricane, who is it that restores them again to their wits, and brings them asleep in a calm? Who made the mighty Whales which swim in a sea of water and have a sea of oil swimming in them? Who first caused the water to imitate the creatures on land? So that the sea is the stable of horse fishes, the stall of kine fishes, the sty of hog fishes, the kennel of dog fishes, and in all things the sea the ape of the land. Whence grows the ambergris in the sea? Which is not so hard to find where it is as what it is! Was not God the first shipwright and all the vessels on the sea descended from the loins (or the ribs rather) of Noah's Ark? Or else who durst be so bold with a few crooked boards nailed together, a stick standing upright and a rag tied to it, to adventure into the ocean? What loadstone first touched the loadstone? Or from first fell it in love with the north, rather affecting that cold climate than the pleasant east or fruitful south or west, how comes that stone to know more than men and find the way to land in a mist Indeed they are God's wonders and that wonder the greatest of all, who seeing them daily neither takes notice of them, admire at them, or is thankful for them."-THOMAS FULLER The Holy and Profane State. |