hat a
tremendous one!--love honour and virtue more: For though they love
stewards with a bull's-eye bright, they'll trouble you for your ticket,
sir--rough passage to-night!

I freely admit it to be a miserable piece of human weakness and
inconsistency, but I no sooner become conscious of those last words from
the steward than I begin to soften towards Calais. Whereas I have been
vindictively wishing that those Calais burghers who came out of their
town by a short cut into the History of England, with those fatal ropes
round their necks by which they have since been towed into so many
cartoons, had all been hanged on the spot, I now begin to regard them as
highly respectable and virtuous tradesmen. Looking about me, I see the
light of Cape Grinez well astern of the boat on the davits to leeward,
and the light of Calais Harbour undeniably at its old tricks, but still
ahead and shining. Sentiments of forgiveness of Calais, not to say of
attachment to Calais, begin to expand my bosom. I have weak notions that
I will stay there a day or two on my way back. A faded and recumbent
stranger, pausing in a profound reverie over the rim of a basin, asked
me what kind of place Calais is? I tell him (Heaven forgive me!) a very
agreeable place indeed--rather hilly than otherwise.

So strangely goes the time, and on the whole so quickly--though still I
seem to have been on board a week--that I am bumped, rolled, gurgled,
washed, and pitched into Calais Harbour before her maiden smile has
finally lighted her through the Green Isle. When blest for ever is she
who relied On entering Calais at the top of the tide. For we have not to
land to-night down among those slimy timbers--covered with green hair as
if it were the mermaid's favourite combing-place--where one crawls to
the surface of the jetty, like a stranded shrimp; but we go steaming up
the harbour to the Railway-station Quay. And, as we go, the sea washes
in and out among the piles and planks with dead, heavy beats and in
quite a furious manner (whereof we are proud), and the lamps shake in
the wind, and the bells of Calais striking One seem to send their
vibrations struggling against troubled air, as we have come struggling
against troubled water. And now, in the sudden relief and wiping of
faces, everybody on board seems to have had a prodigious double-tooth
out, and to be this very instant free of the dentist's hands. And now we
all know for the first time how wet and cold we