are his stock in trade
waits for the return-tide to enact his shrewd and pantomimic
morality-play by a hurried shuffle up and down the pavement. The
news-dealers--even the enterprising female who summons mercy to the aid
of commerce by her absurdly lugubrious visage--have the paper and the
change all ready to thrust into their customer's hand. The scene at the
crossing of the street baffles description. Talk of the day of miracles
being past! One who can watch this scene of scare and scamper and
hair-breadth escape and not believe in a particular Providence must be
incorrigibly heterodox.

The tide reaches the outer gate in a state of lively congestion. The
person in front of you as you pass the toll-taker's booth is quite sure
to have forgotten his ticket, and has to set down his parcels while he
fumbles through all his pockets for it. You are sure you hear the inner
gate closing. You dash through the ferry-house in the most undignified
manner and unphilosophic mood--to find that you have five minutes to
spare! And you take your stand beside your double, who has been all this
time enjoying the little woes and absurdities of others,--including
yourself.

The current has hardly slackened when the long gate begins to roll to.
The last passenger has to edge himself through sideways, at some peril
of his packages if not of himself, and at the tender mercy of the
gate-keeper. Not the last would-be passenger, however; for a frantic
form is seen to dart through the narrow and tortuous pass from the
street and fling itself upon the closed barrier, appealing in eloquent
indignation to the inexorable Cerberus, and then gazing, with face
against the lattice, in imbecile despair at the receding boat.
Simultaneous with the thud of the shutting gate is the clank of chains
and the rattle of clamps and clogs, as of the striking off of fetters
and handcuffs, an asthmatic jingle of a bell somewhere in the body of
the boat, a slight slush of revolving paddle-wheels, and the great
brute, as steady as a spirit-level and as powerful as a battering-ram,
separates itself from the dock like the opening blade of a penknife. You
recall the good old days when there were no cruelly-humane gates, and
when this stage of the proceeding was marked by a wild leap of belated
forms across the widening chasm, with now and then the souse of a
miscalculating passenger into the yeasty brine. The scene is less
picturesque and exciting now, but it is decidedl