morning till six at night the hard labour of the prison-house,
which rewards the valiance of ships that win the harbour went on
steadily, great slings of general cargo swinging over the rail, to
drop plumb into the hatchways at the sign of the gangway-tender's
hand. The New South Dock was especially a loading dock for the
Colonies in those great (and last) days of smart wool-clippers,
good to look at and--well--exciting to handle. Some of them were
more fair to see than the others; many were (to put it mildly)
somewhat over-masted; all were expected to make good passages; and
of all that line of ships, whose rigging made a thick, enormous
network against the sky, whose brasses flashed almost as far as the
eye of the policeman at the gates could reach, there was hardly one
that knew of any other port amongst all the ports on the wide earth
but London and Sydney, or London and Melbourne, or London and
Adelaide, perhaps with Hobart Town added for those of smaller
tonnage. One could almost have believed, as her gray-whiskered
second mate used to say of the old Duke of S-, that they knew the
road to the Antipodes better than their own skippers, who, year in,
year out, took them from London--the place of captivity--to some
Australian port where, twenty-five years ago, though moored well
and tight enough to the wooden wharves, they felt themselves no
captives, but honoured guests.



XXXIV.



These towns of the Antipodes, not so great then as they are now,