Читать книгу The Color of a Great City онлайн

20 страница из 66

The skyline, the ship masts, the sun, the water, all these are alike. The very ship is the same, apparently, and the sun drops down as it did that other day when his picture was painted. The stars come out, the masts rock, swinging their little lamps, the water runs sipping and sucking at the docks and piers. The winds blow cool, and there is silence until the morning. Then the waterfront assumes its quaint, delicious, easy atmosphere once more. It is once more fresh and free. So runs its tide, so runs its life, so runs our very world away.

ssss1

An ocean pilot-boat lay off Tompkinsville of an early spring afternoon, in the stillest water. The sun was bright, and only the lightest wind was stirring. When we reached the end of the old cotton dock, an illustrator and myself, commissioned by a then but now no more popular magazine, there she was, a small, two-masted schooner of about fifty tons burden, rocking gently upon the water. We accepted the services of a hawking urchin, who had a canoe to rent, and who had followed us down the main street in the hope of earning a half-dollar. He led the way through a hole in a fence that enclosed the street at the water end and down a long, stilted plank walk to a mess of craft and rigging, where we found his little tub, and pushed out. In a few minutes we had crossed the quiet stretch of water and were alongside.