as we made our salutations, and called out
after the retreating couple as they passed away under the lamplight on
the wharf.

Thus it was that our farewells were smuggled through under an ambuscade
of laughter, and the parting over ere I knew it was begun. The figures
vanished, the steps died away along the silent city front; on board, the
men had returned to their labours, the captain to his solitary cigar;
and after that long and complex day of business and emotion, I was at
last alone and free. It was, perhaps, chiefly fatigue that made my heart
so heavy. I leaned at least upon the house, and stared at the foggy
heaven, or over the rail at the wavering reflection of the lamps, like a
man that was quite done with hope and would have welcomed the asylum of
the grave. And all at once, as I thus stood, the City of Pekin flashed
into my mind, racing her thirteen knots for Honolulu, with the hated
Trent--perhaps with the mysterious Goddedaal--on board; and with the
thought, the blood leaped and careered through all my body. It seemed no
chase at all; it seemed we had no chance, as we lay there bound to iron
pillars, and fooling away the precious moments over tins of beans. "Let
them get there first!" I thought. "Let them! We can't be long behind."
And from that moment, I date myself a man of a rounded experience:
nothing had lacked but this, that I should entertain and welcome the
grim thought of bloodshed.

It was long before the toil remitted in the cabin, and it was worth
my while to get to bed; long after that, before sleep favoured me;
and scarce a moment later (or so it seemed) when I was recalled to
consciousness by bawling men and the jar of straining hawsers.

The schooner was cast off before I got on deck. In the misty obscurity
of the first dawn, I saw the tug heading us with glowing fires and
blowing smoke, and heard her beat the roughened waters of the bay.
Beside us, on her flock of hills, the lighted city towered up and
stood swollen in the raw fog. It was strange to see her burn on thus
wastefully, with half-quenched luminaries, when the dawn was already
grown strong enough to show me, and to suffer me to recognise, a
solitary figure standing by the piles.

Or was it really the eye, and not rather the heart, that identified that
shadow in the dusk, among the shoreside lamps? I know not. It was Jim,
at least; Jim, come for a last look; and we had but time to wave a
valedictory gesture and exchange a word