, and of girls, intent,
expectant, and the white gulls were floating against the grey sky, when
our ship, listed slightly by those thousands of figures straining
towards the land which had bred them, gently slurred up against the high
wharf, and was made fast.

The landing went on till night had long fallen, and the band was gone.
At last the chatter, the words of command, the snatches of song, and
that most favourite chorus: "Me! and my girl!" died away, and the wharf
was silent and the ship silent, and a wonderful clear dark beauty
usurped the spaces of the sky. By the light of the stars and a half moon
the far harbour shores were just visible, the huddled buildings on the
near shore, the spiring masts and feathery appanage of ropes on the
moored ship, and one blood-red light above the black water. The night
had all that breathless beauty which steeps the soul in a quivering,
quiet rapture....

Then it was that clearly, as if I had been a welcomer standing on land
in one of the wharf gaps, I saw her come--slow, slow, creeping up the
narrow channel, in beside the wharf, a great grey silent ship. At first
I thought her utterly empty, deserted, possessed only by the thick
coiled cables forward, the huge rusty anchors, the piled-up machinery of
structure and funnel and mast, weird in the blue darkness. A lantern on
the wharf cast a bobbing golden gleam deep into the oily water at her
side. Gun-grey, perfectly mute, she ceased to move, coming to rest
against the wharf. And then, with a shiver, I saw that something clung
round her, a grey film or emanation, which shifted and hovered, like the
invisible wings of birds in a thick mist. Gradually to my straining eyes
that filmy emanation granulated, and became faces attached to grey filmy
forms, thousands on thousands, and every face bent towards the shore,
staring, as it seemed, through me, at all that was behind me. Slowly,
very slowly, I made them out--faces of helmeted soldiers, bulky with the
gear of battle, their arms outstretched, and the lips of every one
opened, so that I expected to hear the sound of cheering; but no sound
came. Now I could see their eyes. They seemed to beseech--like the eyes
of a little eager boy who asks his mother something she cannot tell him;
and their outstretched hands seemed trying to reach her, lovingly,
desperately trying to reach her! And those opened lips, how terribly
they seemed trying to speak! "Mother! Mother Canada!" As if I had he