swooping slide of the graceful hull down the ways into the placid water.

[Illustration: SCHOONER-RIGGED SHARPIE]

"A schooner let her be!" responded the builder, proud of his handiwork,
and ready to seize the opportunity to confer a novel title upon his novel
creation. Though a combination of old elements, the schooner was in effect
a new design. Barks, ketches, snows, and brigantines carried fore-and-aft
rigs in connection with square sails on either mast, but now for the first
time two masts were rigged fore and aft, and the square sails wholly
discarded. The advantages of the new rig were quickly discovered. Vessels
carrying it were found to sail closer to the wind, were easier to handle
in narrow quarters, and--what in the end proved of prime importance--could
be safely manned by smaller crews. With these advantages the schooner made
its way to the front in the shipping lists. The New England shipyards
began building them, almost to the exclusion of other types. Before their
advance brigs, barks, and even the magnificent full-rigged ship itself
gave way, until now a square-rigged ship is an unusual spectacle on the
ocean. The vitality of the schooner is such that it bids fair to survive
both of the crushing blows dealt to old-fashioned marine architecture--the
substitution of metal for wood, and of steam for sails. To both the
schooner adapted itself. Extending its long, slender hull to carry four,
five, and even seven masts, its builders abandoned the stout oak and pine
for molded iron and later steel plates, and when it appeared that the huge
booms, extending the mighty sails, were difficult for an ordinary crew to
handle, one mast, made like the rest of steel, was transformed into a
smokestack--still bearing sails--a donkey engine was installed in the
hold, and the booms went aloft, or the anchor rose to the peak to the tune
of smoky puffing instead of the rhythmical chanty songs of the sailors. So
the modern schooner, a very leviathan of sailing craft, plows the seas,