you it was the
great Tartarin of Tarascon?--waddled along the quays, followed by
his gun-cases, medicine-chest, and tinned comestibles, to reach the
landing-stage of the Touache Company and the mail steamer the Zouave,
which was to transport him over the sea.

With his ears still ringing with the home applause, intoxicated by the
glare of the heavens and the reek of the sea, Tartarin fairly beamed as
he stepped out with a lofty head, and between his guns on his shoulders,
looking with all his eyes upon that wondrous, dazzling harbour of
Marseilles, which he saw for the first time. The poor fellow believed he
was dreaming. He fancied his name was Sinbad the Sailor, and that he
was roaming in one of those fantastic cities abundant in the "Arabian
Nights." As far as eye could reach there spread a forest of masts and
spars, cris-crossing in every way.

Flags of all countries floated--English, American, Russian, Swedish,
Greek and Tunisian.

The vessels lay alongside the wharves--ay, head on, so that their
bowsprits stuck up out over the strand like rows of bayonets. Over it,
too, sprawled the mermaids, goddesses, madonnas, and other figure-heads
in carved and painted wood which gave names to the ships--all worn by
sea-water, split, mildewed, and dripping. Ever and anon, between the
hulls, a patch of harbour like watered silk splashed with oil. In the
intervals of the yards and booms, what seemed swarms of flies prettily
spotted the blue sky. These were the shipboys, hailing one another in
all languages.

On the waterside, amidst thick green or black rivulets coming down
from the soap factories loaded with oil and soda, bustled a mass of
custom-house officers, messengers, porters, and truckmen with their
bogheys, or trolleys, drawn by Corsican ponies.

There were shops selling quaint articles, smoky shanties where sailors
were cooking their own queer messes, dealers in pipes, monkeys,
parrots, ropes, sailcloth, fanciful curios, amongst which were mingled
higgledy-piggledy old culverins, huge gilded lanterns, worn-out
pulley-blocks, rusty flukeless anchors, chafed cordage, battered
speaking-trumpets, and marine glasses almost contemporary with the Ark.
Sellers of mussels and clams squatted beside their heaps of shellfish
and yawped their goods. Seamen rolled by with tar-pots, smoking
soup-bowls, and big baskets full of cuttlefish, from which they went to
wash the ink in the milky waters of the fountains.

Everywhere a