t dwarfed by the solitude of the grandly planned street. He
had too fine a presence for that. He was only a lonely figure walking
purposefully, with a great white beard like a pilgrim, and with a thick
stick that resembled a weapon. On one side the new Courts of Justice had
a low and unadorned portico of squat columns half concealed by a few old
trees left in the approach. On the other the pavilion wings of the
new Colonial Treasury came out to the line of the street. But Captain
Whalley, who had now no ship and no home, remembered in passing that
on that very site when he first came out from England there had stood a
fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal
creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness
without any docks or waterworks.

No ship--no home. And his poor Ivy away there had no home either. A
boarding-house is no sort of home though it may get you a living. His
feelings were horribly rasped by the idea of the boarding-house. In his
rank of life he had that truly aristocratic temperament characterized by
a scorn of vulgar gentility and by prejudiced views as to the derogatory
nature of certain occupations. For his own part he had always preferred
sailing merchant ships (which is a straightforward occupation) to buying
and selling merchandise, of which the essence is to get the better of
somebody in a bargain--an undignified trial of wits at best. His father
had been Colonel Whalley (retired) of the H. E. I. Company's service,
with very slender means besides his pension, but with distinguished
connections. He could remember as a boy how frequently waiters at the
inns, country tradesmen and small people of that sort, used to "My lord"
the old warrior on the strength of his appearance.

Captain Whalley himself (he would have entered the Navy if his father
had not died before he was fourteen) had something of a grand air which
would have suited an old and glorious admiral; but he became lost like
a straw in the eddy of a brook amongst the swarm of brown and yellow
humanity filling a thoroughfare, that by contrast with the vast and
empty avenue he had left seemed as narrow as a lane and absolutely
riotous with life. The walls of the houses were blue; the shops of the
Chinamen yawned like cavernous lairs; heaps of nondescript merchandise
overflowed the gloom of the long range of arcades, and the fiery
serenity of sunset took the middle of the street from end to e