th our heads
as we try to sleep in air thick with coal dust.

[Illustration]

This morning the racket is like nothing else in the world. It is a
combination of the babel of the East and West, of Europe and Africa.
There are four groups of musicians alongside, harpists, singers and
fiddlers, all within the ship's length on the quay, and others in boats
alongside.

We have two gangways reaching to the wharf, where are hundreds of
porters, ship waiters and stewards bringing vegetables on board, and
ships officers and hundreds of newly arrived passengers, all talking
more or less over the music, and passing to and fro across the gangways
in the sun. The ship feels too full to move in now. The new arrivals
look a little pale and tired after their overland journey by Paris, but
we weather-worn people with The Bay behind us, enjoy the whole scene
with the calm of experienced mariners! Behind the sunlit groups of
passengers with their baggage, the dock labourers in the sheds pile
grain sacks on to waggons, and strings of stout horses stand resting
beside them. On the edge of the quay are flower girls in black, selling
big bunches of violets, and a Strong-man in pink tights and sky-blue
knickerbockers--a festive piece of colour taken with his two white
chairs and bright carpet. He plays with silver balls and does balancing
feats with his little girl, and puts his arms round her and strokes her
hair after each turn, in a delicate appeal to the sympathies of
passengers who lean over the rail and take it all in somewhat sleepily.

... The post has brought me an Orient-Pacific guide-book which I wish I
had had coming down channel and along the Portuguese coast. I would
recommend it to anyone going this journey. It has a most interesting
collection of facts both about sea and land on the route.

... We met the beautiful French lady again last night at the Hotel de
Louvre, where everyone meets everyone else up town. I think she is
Gascon, and the very opposite of the fair Saxon type we ought to admire
at home. You hardly expect a perfectly beautiful woman to talk well, but
this perfection could both talk and dress; her personality was not "sunk
in her hat." She knew Scottish history, all about the good Lord James,
and about Mary Stuart, and what pleased us greatly was that she told us
words and hummed the airs of children's songs reputed to have been
written by Queen Mary, and which she said are sung to-day by French
children. T