ships -- all worn by sea-water, split, mildewed, and dripping. Ever
and anon, between the hulls, a patch of harbour like watered silk
splashed with oil. In the intervals of the yards and booms, what
seemed swarms of flies prettily spotted the blue sky. These were
the shipboys, hailing one another in all languages.

On the waterside, amidst thick green or black rivulets coming down
from the soap factories loaded with oil and soda, bustled a mass of
custom-house officers, messengers, porters, and truckmen with
their bogheys, or trolleys, drawn by Corsican ponies.

There were shops selling quaint articles, smoky shanties where
sailors were cooking their own queer messes, dealers in pipes,
monkeys, parrots, ropes, sailcloth, fanciful curios, amongst which
were mingled higgledy-piggledy old culverins, huge gilded lanterns,
worn-out pulley-blocks, rusty flukeless anchors, chafed cordage,
battered speaking-trumpets, and marine glasses almost
contemporary with the Ark. Sellers of mussels and clams squatted
beside their heaps of shellfish and yawped their goods. Seamen
rolled by with tar-pots, smoking soup-bowls, and big baskets full of
cuttlefish, from which they went to wash the ink in the milky waters
of the fountains.

Everywhere a prodigious collection of all kinds of goods: silks,
minerals, wood in stacks, lead in pigs, cloths, sugars, caruba wood
logs, colza seed, liquorice sticks, sugar-canes. The East and the
West cheek by jowl, even to pyramids of Dutch cheeses which the
Genoese were dyeing red by contact with their hands.

Yonder was the corn market: porters discharging sacks down the