lean over the rail, and gaze wistfully at us.  Ah, how many thousands of miles they must travel ere they reach their new home!  Strange and pitiful it is to think that so few of them will ever see the old home again; and yet there is something bright and hopeful in the spectacle, if we think not of individuals, but of the world’s future.  Under the Southern Cross a mighty state is rising; the inevitable movement of populations is irresistible as the tides of mid-ocean; and those wistful emigrants who quietly wave their handkerchiefs to us are about to assist in working out the destiny of a new world.  Dull!  The passing of that great vessel gives matter for grave thought.  She swings away, and we may perhaps try to run alongside for a while, but the immense drag of her four towers of canvas soon draws her clear, and she speedily looms once more like a cloud on the horizon.  Good-bye!  The squat collier lumbers along, and her leisurely grimy skipper salutes as we near him.  It is marvellous to reflect that the whole of our coal-trade was carried on in those queer tubs only sixty years ago.  They are passing away, and the gallant, ignorant, comical race of sailors who manned them has all but disappeared; the ugly sordid iron box that goes snorting past us, belching out jets of water from her dirty side—­that is the agency that destroyed the colliers, and, alas, destroyed the finest breed of seamen that ever the world saw!  So rapidly do new sights and sounds greet us that the night steals down almost before we are aware of its approach.  The day is for joy; but, ah, the night is for subtle overmastering rapture, for pregnant gloom, for thoughts that lie too deep for tears!  If a wind springs up when the last ray of the sun shoots over the shoulder of the earth, then the ship roars through an inky sea, and the mysterious blending of terror and ecstasy cannot be restrained.  Hoarsely the breeze shrieks in the cordage, savagely the water roars as it darts away astern like a broad fierce white flame.  The vessel seems to spring forward and shake herself with passion as the sea retards her, and the whole wild symphony of humming ropes, roaring water, screaming wind, sets every pulse bounding.  Should the moon shine out from the charging clouds, then earth has not anything to show more fair; the broad track of light looks like an immeasurable river peopled by fiery serpents that dart and writhe and interwind, until the eye aches with gazing on them.  Sleep seems impossible at first, and yet by degrees the poppied touch lulls our nerves, and we slumber without heeding the harrowing groans of the timbers or the confused cries of the wind.