ike pieces of green carpet smoothly pegged out, its long ranges
of trees lined up in colossal porticos of dark shafts roofed with a
vault of branches.

Some of these avenues ended at the sea. It was a terraced shore; and
beyond, upon the level expanse, profound and glistening like the gaze
of a dark-blue eye, an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself
indefinitely through the gap between a couple of verdant twin islets.
The masts and spars of a few ships far away, hull down in the outer
roads, sprang straight from the water in a fine maze of rosy lines
penciled on the clear shadow of the eastern board. Captain Whalley gave
them a long glance. The ship, once his own, was anchored out there. It
was staggering to think that it was open to him no longer to take a boat
at the jetty and get himself pulled off to her when the evening came. To
no ship. Perhaps never more. Before the sale was concluded, and till the
purchase-money had been paid, he had spent daily some time on board the
Fair Maid. The money had been paid this very morning, and now, all at
once, there was positively no ship that he could go on board of when he
liked; no ship that would need his presence in order to do her work--to
live. It seemed an incredible state of affairs, something too bizarre
to last. And the sea was full of craft of all sorts. There was that prau
lying so still swathed in her shroud of sewn palm-leaves--she too had
her indispensable man. They lived through each other, this Malay he had
never seen, and this high-sterned thing of no size that seemed to be
resting after a long journey. And of all the ships in sight, near and
far, each was provided with a man, the man without whom the finest ship
is a dead thing, a floating and purposeless log.

After his one glance at the roadstead he went on, since there was
nothing to turn back for, and the time must be got through somehow. The
avenues of big trees ran straight over the Esplanade, cutting each other
at diverse angles, columnar below and luxuriant above. The interlaced
boughs high up there seemed to slumber; not a leaf stirred overhead:
and the reedy cast-iron lampposts in the middle of the road, gilt like
scepters, diminished in a long perspective, with their globes of white
porcelain atop, resembling a barbarous decoration of ostriches' eggs
displayed in a row. The flaming sky kindled a tiny crimson spark upon
the glistening surface of each glassy shell.

With his chin sunk a