2 Samuel 19:18 - "And there went over a ferry boat to carry over the king’s household, and to do what he thought good" (KJV).

In our highly-automated, machine-oriented world, I don’t suppose that we often think about the little jobs that are still done by hand - by men - by sheer manual labor. And yet, surprisingly, many of these jobs are very necessary in our workaday lives.

For example, take the lowly ferryman. I suppose, if you’ve visited New York City, you might have taken the Long Island Ferry across to the Island, perhaps just for the sake of saying that you had been on it.

But did you know that the fifty ferryboats operating in San Francisco Bay carried as many as fifty million passengers a year before the building o…