A few words in sea life--as fish, mere, and row--are said to be so old that the philologists refer them to the Aryans, or, as others might say, give them up as a bad job. These words appear to be common to all the sons of Adam who preferred adventurous change to security in monotony, and so signed on as slaves to a galley. Anchor we imported from the Greeks--it is declared to be the oldest word from the Mediterranean in the language of our ships; admiral from the Arabs, and hammock and hurricane from the Caribs, through the Spaniards. But other words of our seamen are as native to us as our grey weather, for we brought them with other habits overseas from the North--words like hail, storm, sea, ship, sail, strand, cliff, shower, mast, and flood. To examine words in this manner is simply to invite trouble, as did the man who assumed that "bending a sail" was done as one would bend a cane, not knowing that the sailor uses that word in the original sense of "fastening." Once, in my ignorance, I imagined "schooner" was of Dutch origin, but was careful to refer to the invaluable Skeat. Only just in time, though. And he says that the word was born on the Clyde, grew up in New England, migrated to Holland, and then came back to us again. Once upon a time (1713) at Gloucester, Massachusetts, a man was witnessing a new fore-and-aft rigged vessel glide away on a trial trip, and exclaimed "She scoons!" So all her kind were christened. Science of that kind is almost as good as romance. XIX. Illusions