And meanwhile the whistle of the steamer has blown again for a
quarter to seven:--loud and long this time, for any one not here now
is late for certain; unless he should happen to come down in the last
fifteen minutes.

What a crowd upon the wharf and how they pile on to the steamer! It's
a wonder that the boat can hold them all. But that's just the
marvellous thing about the Mariposa Belle.

I don't know,--I have never known,--where the steamers like the
Mariposa Belle come from. Whether they are built by Harland and Wolff
of Belfast, or whether, on the other hand, they are not built by
Harland and Wolff of Belfast, is more than one would like to say
offhand.

The Mariposa Belle always seems to me to have some of those strange
properties that distinguish Mariposa itself. I mean, her size seems
to vary so. If you see her there in the winter, frozen in the ice
beside the wharf with a snowdrift against the windows of the pilot
house, she looks a pathetic little thing the size of a butternut.
But in the summer time, especially after you've been in Mariposa for
a month or two, and have paddled alongside of her in a canoe, she
gets larger and taller, and with a great sweep of black sides, till
you see no difference between the Mariposa Belle and the Lusitania.
Each one is a big steamer and that's all you can say.

Nor do her measurements help you much. She draws about eighteen
inches forward, and more than that,--at least half an inch more,
astern, and when she's loaded down with an excursion crowd she draws
a good two inches more. And above the water,--why, look at all the