floated half hidden under the arch of masonry, with her spars lowered
down, without a sound of life on board, and covered from stem to stern
with a ridge of palm-leaf mats. He had left behind him the overheated
pavements bordered by the stone frontages that, like the sheer face of
cliffs, followed the sweep of the quays; and an unconfined spaciousness
of orderly and sylvan aspect opened before him its wide plots of rolled
grass, like pieces of green carpet smoothly pegged out, its long ranges
of trees lined up in colossal porticos of dark shafts roofed with a
vault of branches.

Some of these avenues ended at the sea. It was a terraced shore; and
beyond, upon the level expanse, profound and glistening like the gaze
of a dark-blue eye, an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself
indefinitely through the gap between a couple of verdant twin islets.
The masts and spars of a few ships far away, hull down in the outer
roads, sprang straight from the water in a fine maze of rosy lines
penciled on the clear shadow of the eastern board. Captain Whalley gave
them a long glance. The ship, once his own, was anchored out there. It
was staggering to think that it was open to him no longer to take a boat
at the jetty and get himself pulled off to her when the evening came. To
no ship. Perhaps never more. Before the sale was concluded, and till the
purchase-money had been paid, he had spent daily some time on board the
Fair Maid. The money had been paid this very morning, and now, all at
once, there was positively no ship that he could go on board of when he
liked; no ship that would need his presence in order to do her work--to
live. It seemed an incredible state of affairs, something too bizarre
to last. And the sea was full of craft of all sorts. There was that prau
lying so still swathed in her shroud of sewn palm-leaves--she too had
her indispensable man. They lived through each other, this Malay he had
never seen, and this high-sterned thing of no size that seemed to be