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Oldport Days by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
page 20 of 175 (11%)
built forty feet high, and at ebb-tide you may look down on the
schooners lying aground upon the mud below. In six hours they
will be floating at your side. But the motions of the tide are as
resistless whether its rise be six feet or forty; as in the lazy
stretching of the caged lion's paw you can see all the terrors of
his spring.

Our principal wharf, the oldest in the town, has lately been
doubled in size, and quite transformed in shape, by an
importation of broad acres from the country. It is now what is
called "made land,"--a manufacture which has grown so easy that I
daily expect to see some enterprising contractor set up endwise a
bar of railroad iron, and construct a new planet at its summit,
which shall presently go spinning off into space and be called an
asteroid. There are some people whom would it be pleasant to
colonize in that way; but meanwhile the unchanged southern side
of the pier seems pleasanter, with its boat-builders' shops, all
facing sunward,--a cheerful haunt upon a winter's day. On the
early maps this wharf appears as "Queen-Hithe," a name more
graceful than its present cognomen. "Hithe" or "Hythe" signifies
a small harbor, and is the final syllable of many English names,
as of Lambeth. Hythe is also one of those Cinque-Ports of which
the Duke of Wellington was warden. This wharf was probably still
familiarly called Queen-Hithe in 1781, when Washington and
Rochambeau walked its length bareheaded between the ranks of
French soldiers; and it doubtless bore that name when Dean
Berkeley arrived in 1729, and the Rev. Mr. Honyman and all his
flock closed hastily their prayer-books, and hastened to the
landing to receive their guest. But it had lost this name ere the
days, yet remembered by aged men, when the Long Wharf became a
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