The captain, when bound on a voyage, generally slips his cable or weighs anchor with the rising sun. His crew are first-rate helmsmen; and to see them sweep into the rickyard through the narrow gateway, with a heavy deck cargo piled to the skies, all sail set, a stiff breeze, and the timbers creaking, is a glorious sight! Not a scrape against the jetty, though `touch and go' is the sign of a good pilot. His greatest trouble is when his cargo shifts out of sight of land: 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 successfully 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 experienced 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 devil and the idle hands is notoriously 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 his own use, brings home his furniture. After a while his own children go for a ride in it, and play in it when stationary in the shed. In the painful ending the waggon carries the weak-kneed old man in pity to and from the old town for his weekly store of goods, or mayhap for his weekly dole of that staff of life his aged teeth can hardly grind. And many a plain coffin has the old waggon carried to the distant churchyard on the side of the hill. It is a cold spot--as life, too, was cold and hard; yet in the spring the daisies will come, and the thrushes will sing on the bough.