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I do not charge Howard with superstition, we are none of us superstitious, but when I spoke about his returning to Montevideo on the Spray he shook his head and took a steam-packet instead. I had not been in Buenos Aires for a number of years. The place where I had once landed from packets, in a cart, was now built up with magnificent docks.
Always men are working and bringing things to the great City and sending things out. If it were not so the City could not live at all, because the people must be fed and clothed, and they can't make everything they want or grow what they want to eat in London itself. Down in this part of London there are huge docks, but I am quite sure you do not know what docks are.
It owned a line of iron steamships that carried the ore to the Pittsburgh railroad connections. It owned the railroads that brought the ore from the mines to the docks, and it owned the docks. It owned vast coalmines in Pennsylvania, and it owned a controlling interest in the Connellville coke-ovens, whence five miles of freight-cars, in fair times, were daily sent to the mills, loaded with coke.
A standing garrison of only five thousand men was left in San Francisco, and these at once occupied the coast-batteries and prepared them for defense. The same thing was of course done with the docks and the naval station, with Oakland and all the other towns situated on the bay. The sudden appearance of the enemy had in every case had a positively paralyzing effect.
But far out into the distance, almost to the horizon, I could plainly see a large steamer headed toward the vast ocean beyond. I looked around in a confused sort of a way, and discovered, to my surprise, that I was standing almost at the water's edge on one of the docks near Battery Place. It was daylight, and the sun was shining overhead.
"With pleasure," said the man, "if you will accompany " "Stay, don't trouble yourself to show me the way," interrupted Miles; "just name a house and the street, that will " "No trouble at all, sir," said the man. "I happen to be going in the direction of the docks, and know of excellent as well as cheap lodgings there." Making no further objection, Miles followed his new friend into the street.
As they cleared the old transport docks they made out the Nuestra well off the breakwater, her brown, bare masts rising like spires from her black hull, and the morning sun glinting from a strip of brass on her taffrail. They could see busy figures aboard, and as they drew nearer Captain Jarrow appeared on the poop-deck smoking a cigar.
Ten o'clock on the following morning. Hundreds of people lined up before the doors of San Francisco banks. Men of all classes; top-hatted merchants rubbed elbows with red-shirted miners, Irish laborers smoking clay pipes, Mexican vaqueros, roustabouts from the docks, gamblers, bartenders, lawyers, doctors, politicians.
In particular, the two great vices to which sailors are most addicted, and which they practice to the ruin of both body and soul; these things, were the most enlarged upon. And several times on the docks, I have seen a robed clergyman addressing a large audience of women collected from the notorious lanes and alleys in the neighborhood.
Thinking of all that past, seeing it all within his mind, and seeing but little of the present; as, in the low yellow light, he helped, for his bread, the workmen to heave the great beams, to carry the great stones of the cathedral, to split the huge marble masses while they stared in astonished envy; as he sat, unconscious of their mutterings, eating his dry bread and porridge in the building docks by the river.
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