resent
berth depressed many of us: I had already observed, or judged, that
whatever the earlier mariners may have thought of seafaring, the modern
sailor's idea in sailing is to get back home as early as possible. We
soon heard that four days of public holiday, the Carnival, would be
added to our term. It was evident that one must make the best of it, and
be thankful on those days when some actual progress was made.

Mosquitoes, as I have said, were a great subject here. We had
opportunities to study them. With _Macbeth_ in hand as a convenient
weapon., I nightly reduced the horde, but these

Stubborn spearsmen still made good
The dark impenetrable wood.

The heat grew sickly sometimes at night, and the cabins were black with
flies and mosquitoes alike. To sleep there was to be slowly suffocated,
let alone the folly of sleeping among man-eaters. An outdoor faith was
forced upon me, and yet the deck was no real enclosure from the enemy:
the faith would end at four or so in the morning, a time of day to which
I was becoming as accustomed as of old, and when the riverside gave off a
smell which I remembered noticing in the trench regions east of Bethune.
Then, still hopeful, I would face my cabin and soon after swathing
myself in the brief sheets of the bunk would be asleep. That interim
unrecognized, here I was awake again in a world where chisels chip paint
and steam-driven machines tip tons of coal. The great buckets were now
being strung over to railway vans, which were shunted duly by a small
engine. Winches clattered and wrenched, the clanking engine bustled
almost ludicrously up and down the wharf, and all seemed in a great
hurry, but the hurry was only on the surface. The yellow river, the
coal-dust, the glaring sun, the dockside streets and warehouses and of
course the eternal mosquito began to play upon me. My body was in pain
from the innumerable bites and want of rest, and generally I was in as
low spirits as I could be.

The ship was daily haunted by newsboys, fruit-sellers, and others. The
news was difficult to discover from the queer columns of short cabled
messages, and yet we never sent the newsboy away unless, perhaps, our
only means was in English coppers. Sixpences he (not unwisely) was willing
to take. The fruit-sellers gave better value for sixpence, even though
their open panniers seemed always liable to the predatory paws of the
water police. The shoemaker with his motor tyre put pieces