hthouse loomed, the heated
air trembling around it, and giving it so vague and misty a guise that,
being by itself a thing of night and storm and darkness, it looked now as
unreal as a ghost by daylight. On the other side of the harbor lay the
marshes, threaded by steaming creeks, up which here and there the pointed
sails of the hidden hay-barges crept, the sunshine turning them to white
flames: farther off stood a screen of woods, and from brim to brim between
swelled the broad, smooth sheet of the river, coming from the great
mountains that gave it birth, washing clean a score of towns on its way,
and loitering just here by the pleasant old fishing-town, whose wharves,
once doing a mighty business with the Antilles and the farther Indies,
now, in the absence of their half dozen foreign-going craft, lay at the
mercy of any sand-droger that chose to fling her cable round their
capstans. A few idle masts swayed there, belonging to small fishers and
fruiters, a solid dew of pitch oozing from their sides in the sun, but not
a sail set: a lonely watchman went the rounds among them, a ragged urchin
bobbed for flounders in the dock, but otherwise wharves and craft were
alike forsaken, and the sun glared down on them as though his rays had
made them a desert. The harbor-water lay like glass: now and then the tide
stirred it, and all the brown and golden reflections of masts and spars
with it, into the likeness of a rippled agate. Not one of the boats that
were ordinarily to be seen darting hither and yon, like so many
water-bugs, were in motion now; none of the white sails of the gay
sea-parties were running up and swelling with the breeze; none of the
usual naked and natatory cherubs were diving off the wharves into that
deep, warm water; the windows on the seaward side of the town were closed;
the countless children, that were wont to infest the lower streets as if
they grew with no more cost or trouble than the grass between the bricks,
had disappeared in the mysterious way in which swarms of flies will
disappear, as if an east wind had blown them; but no east wind was blowing
here. In all the scene there was hardly any other sign of life than the
fervent sunbeams shedding their cruel lustre overhead: the river flowed
silent and lonely from shore to shore; the whole hot summer sky stretched
just as silent and lonely from horizon to horizon; only the old ferryman,
edging along the bank till he was far up stream, crossed the nar