Where are they now, I wonder? Are they still buffeting the seas, or do they lie moored and outmoded beside some green wharf, their days of usefulness over? I remember hoping, as I watched them pass out to sea, that they would not share the fate of the unknown craft which lay buried in the sands a mile down the coast. It was said that she came ashore in the "Great Storm" of 1814 (or thereabouts). Nothing was left of her in our day but her sturdy ribs, which thrust up a few feet above the sand, outlining her shape, and were only visible at low water. On a stormy day, when the seas were high, I used to stand at the head of the beach and try to picture how she drove up on the shore, shuddering deliciously as each great wave came pounding down on all that was left of her oaken frame. When I read in the newspaper of a wreck I thought of her, and I think of her to this day on such occasions, thrusting up black and dripping ribs above the wet sands at low water, or vanishing beneath the pounding foam of the breakers. If you take the shore line train from Boston to New York, you pass through a sleepy old town in Connecticut where a spur track with rusty rails runs out to the wharves, and moored to these wharves are side-wheel steamers which once plied the Sound. It served somebody's purpose or pocket better to discontinue the line, and with its cessation and the cessation of work in the ship yards close by, the old town passed into a state of salty somnolence. The harbour is glassy and still, opening out to the blue waters of the Sound. Still are the white steamers by the wharves, where once the gang planks shook with the tread of feet and the rumble of baggage trucks. Many a time, as the train paused at the station, I have watched the black stacks for some hint of smoke, hoping against hope that I should see the old ship move, and turn, and go about her rightful seafaring. But it was never to be. There were only ghosts in engine room and pilot house. Like the abandoned dwelling on the upland road to Monterey, these steamers were mute witnesses to a vanished order. But always as the train pulled out from the station I sat on the rear platform and watched the white town and the white steamers and the glassy harbour slip backward into the haze--and it seemed as if that haze was the gentle breath of oblivion.