and a sun-blackened mate smoking a rat-tail Dutch cigar was supervising
the moving of elephant tusks in a milky glimmer of ivory ashore.

There was a vague murmur of the rising tide, beyond the wharves and
warehouses the water was faintly rippled in silver and rose, and a ship
was standing into the harbor with all her canvas spread to the light
wind. He turned away with a sigh and walked slowly up toward the elms of
Pleasant Street. At his front door he stopped to regard the polished
brass plate where in place of his name he had caused to be engraved the
words Java Head. They held for him, coming into this pleasant dwelling
after so many tumultuous years at sea, the symbol of the safe and happy
end of an arduous voyage; just as the high black rock of Java Head
thrusting up over the horizon promised the placidity and accomplishment
of the Sunda Strait. Whenever he noticed the plate he felt again the
relief of coasting that northerly shore:

He saw the mate forward with the crew passing the chains through the
hawse pipes and shackling them to the anchors. The island rose from level
groves of shore palms to lofty blue peaks terraced with rice and
red-massed kina plantations, with shining streams and green kananga
flowers and tamarinds. The land breeze, fragrant with clove buds and
cinnamon, came off to the ship in the vaporous dusk; and, in the blazing
sunlight of morning, the Anjer sampans swarmed out with a shrill chatter
of brilliant birds, monkeys and naked brown humanity, piled with dark
green oranges and limes and purple mangosteen.

In the last few years, particularly with Gerrit away, he had turned more
and more from the surroundings of his house--rather it had become
William's house--to an inner life of memories. His own active life seemed
to him to have been infinitely fuller, more purposeful and various, than