l had made it
go smoothly from the start. And as he was retiring Mr. Denham, already
seated before the papers, called out after him, "Next month the Dido
starts for a cruise that way, and I shall request her captain officially
to give you a look in and see how you get on." The Dido was one of the
smart frigates on the China station--and five-and-thirty years make a
big slice of time. Five-and-thirty years ago an enterprise like his had
for the colony enough importance to be looked after by a Queen's ship.
A big slice of time. Individuals were of some account then. Men like
himself; men, too, like poor Evans, for instance, with his red face,
his coal-black whiskers, and his restless eyes, who had set up the first
patent slip for repairing small ships, on the edge of the forest, in
a lonely bay three miles up the coast. Mr. Denham had encouraged that
enterprise too, and yet somehow poor Evans had ended by dying at
home deucedly hard up. His son, they said, was squeezing oil out of
cocoa-nuts for a living on some God-forsaken islet of the Indian Ocean;
but it was from that patent slip in a lonely wooded bay that had sprung
the workshops of the Consolidated Docks Company, with its three
graving basins carved out of solid rock, its wharves, its jetties,
its electric-light plant, its steam-power houses--with its gigantic
sheer-legs, fit to lift the heaviest weight ever carried afloat, and
whose head could be seen like the top of a queer white monument peeping
over bushy points of land and sandy promontories, as you approached the
New Harbor from the west.

There had been a time when men counted: there were not so many carriages
in the colony then, though Mr. Denham, he fancied, had a buggy. And
Captain Whalley seemed to be swept out of the great avenue by the swirl
of a mental backwash. He remembered muddy shores, a harbor without
quays, the one solitary wooden pier (but that was a public work) jutting
out crookedly, the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught
fire mysteriously and smoldered for days, so that amazed ships came
into a roadstead full of sulphurous smoke, and the sun hung blood-red
at midday. He remembered the things, the faces, and something more
besides--like the faint flavor of a cup quaffed to the bottom, like a
subtle sparkle of the air that was not to be found in the atmosphere of
to-day.

In this evocation, swift and full of detail like a flash of magnesium
light into the niches of a dark