The streets were thronged with busy people. The shops and cafes were
thronged. At all the bathing places along the bay crowds of men, women,
and children were plunging with joy into the cool, transparent water.
The walls and kiosks were covered with gay advertisements of balls,
concerts, theatres, and open air music-halls. Flaunting and flirting to
and fro, women recalled what pleasure was. Electric trams went clanging
down the lines. Motors hooted as they set off for tours in the Alps.
Little carriages, with many-coloured hoods, loitered temptingly beside
tine pavements. The stalls along the quay shone with every variety of
gleaming fish, and every produce of the kindly earth. The sun went
smiling through the air; the sea smiled in answer. And over all, high
upon her rocky hill, watched the great image of Notre Dame de la Garde.

"This is civilisation! This is liberty!" cried a Frenchman, who had
joined our ship in Turkey, and was now seated beside me, enjoying the
return to security, peace, and the comfort of his own language.

Yes; it was civilisation, and it was liberty. Has not the name of
Marseilles breathed the very spirit of liberty all over the world? And
yet his words recalled to me another scene, and the remark of another
native of Marseilles.

We were steaming slowly along the West Coast of Africa, landing cargo at
point after point, or calling for it as required. Day by day we wallowed
through the oily water, under a misty sun, that did not roast, but
boiled. Day by day we watched the low-lying shore--the unvarying line of
white beach, almost as white as the foam which dashed against it; and
beyond the beach, the long black line of unbroken forest. Nothing was to
be seen but those parallel lines of white beach and black forest,
stretching both ways to the horizon. At dawn they were partly concealed
by serpentining ghosts of mist that slowly vanished under the increasing
heat; and at sunset the mists stole silently over them again. But all
day and all night the sickly stench of vegetation, putrefying in the
steam of those forests from age to age, pervaded the ship as with the
breath of plague.

One morning the scream of our whistle and the bang of our little
signal-gun, followed by the prolonged rattle of the anchor-chain running
through the hawse-pipe, showed that we had reached some point of call.
The ship lay about half a mile off shore, and one could see black
figures running about the beach and push