Aires soon began to thin away and disclose
great buildings. And now we were almost at our journey's end; and in
hurrying ease, drew past fishing boats and small sailing craft into
the harbour mouth. On our port side, on a sort of palisade running out
into the estuary, a host of sea-eagles perched yelping, their lean black
bodies sharply designed in the white light. Their motto I took to be:
Multitude and solitude. Beyond their grand stand appeared a green grove
of downward foliage, the gaudy precinct of what, I was informed by the
wireless operator, who began to act the guide-book, was a destructor for
the frozen meat industry. He went on to specify the number of animals
daily converted and to give other details which interested him, as an
ex-wielder of the pole-axe; but my attention was distracted by the ships
swinging into an approach crowded with dredgers and their ugly barges
swilling mud, with motor-boats and lighters and as it looked to me
every sort of medium for water traffic, bright and drab, proud and
lowly in a confusion.

The waterway divides. To our left, a channel lies under giant steel
bridges. Our course is not there: we are piloted towards a dock for
passenger and cargo ships, and entering it in a hot glare, and colouring
that almost sears, of sky and water and paint, we make our berth,
wallowing once over the water's breadth to the anger of lesser navigators,
who go by in their boats bawling at the bridge in general. The handsome
passenger boats with their great paddle-wheels and their red awnings lie
opposite our plebeian resting-place: beside a grimy wharf, where small
cranes and coal carts seem to multiply.

Of an expectant company there on Wilson's Wharf, the chief feature was
by immediate common consent recognized in an old lady in a heliotrope
dress, tightly girdled--and she was of mountainous shape. The demure inch
of petticoat revealed below the hem of her well-hitched skirt was not
overlooked. Beside this beldame, a long thin youth, a very reed straw by
comparison, puffed at a cherry cigarette-holder, vacantly but fixedly
eyed the ship and seemed to await her instructions. A laundry cart, with
an insufficient animal in the shafts, stood behind them and showed what
they too stood for, emblems peculiar.

Scarcely had the _Bonadventure_ come to rest before a swarm of anxious
sallow ruffians were aboard for the "ship's orders." The rooms of Hosea
himself were not free from their invasion; not f