At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed
like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had had room for
cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming
with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons. While her husband
read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which
certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to find
information. From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons with
sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither help
nor attention. It seemed a miracle when an old man approached, guessed
their condition, and proposed to row them out to their ship in the
little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of steps.
With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their places,
and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having shrunk
to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square buildings and
oblong buildings placed in rows like a child's avenue of bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it,
ran with great force; bulky barges floated down swiftly escorted by
tugs; police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the current.
The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed across the
line of traffic. In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands upon the
oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he had taken
many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any. He seemed to
recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes, carried delicate feet
across to lawns at Rotherhithe.

"They want bridges now," he said, indicating the monstrous outline of
the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen regarded him, who was putting water
between her and her children. Mournfully she gazed at the ship they were