On the Fringe of the Harbor by John Arthur Barry

Also, in some sort, "Rest Cove," this one, like the last, but differing, inasmuch as for the emnants along its foreshores there will very assuredly be no more sea. They have had their day, and after long years of toil and stress the knacker has had his will of them, and picked their bones clean of all that was worth having, and left them lying lifting great ribs in protest against their fate. And yet, as regards some at least of them, not lonely, but, at the very last, affording warmth and shelter to, perhaps, descendants of those who at an earlier day drove them to and fro the deep seas; fisher folk, now, and boatmen, only too glad of such a refuge for themselves and their families; an amphibious sort of people who can, while hearing the wind blow and the water wash against one side of their dwelling, when they please, walk ashore from the other. From the days of the cave dwellers mankind has been apt to choose curious places to live in, and an almost ready-made refuge has ever forcibly appealed from Palaeolithic ages down, whether formed by human hands or by those of Nature herself. Thus caves and trees, no less than worn out railway vans and carriages, and ships that have seen their day, are still used as homes either by folk who can do no better for themselves, or in some cases of sheer preference. But of all these ready-made resting places that our kind has taken to, the most picturesque is undoubtedly the ruined ship, such a one as, for instance, the artist has found in our first picture--a mere carcase of a vessel, bare-ribbed and broken-backed, hard and fast at low water, amidst rocks and mud; perished as a fabric, yet instinct with human life and the sound of cheery young voices, whilst the smoke curling from the ancient galley funnel over the wooded shores, and the clothes drying and flapping in the wind where once upon a time gales roared under the foot of the great main course, divests the scene of the pathetic features of the second picture with which the knacker has as yet scarcely finished, and the ship-dwellers have not yet taken possession. They will probably do so by and bye, and with tarpaulins and odd bits of planking and galvanised iron erect a nondescript structure over the hollow empty body; and therein people will live, and be born, and die just as they used to do when the old ruin they have found their home in was alive and sound, and wont to rear skyward tall pyramids of snowy canvas as she breasted the broad seas to far off lands.

They are old, very old, these ancient relics, nameless, and with histories that would take much time and travail to unravel, from the birth of them on Tyne or Thames side yards, or North American sheds, to when they used to build them of soft woods by the mile, and cut off to order.