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From this moment nothing worthy of relating occurred till our arrival at Aldea Gallega, where we passed the night, and next morning at three o'clock embarked in the passage-boat for Lisbon, where we arrived at eight and thus terminates my first wandering in the Alemtejo.
The pilot took her into the river; and if the ears of the tourists had been filled full of Manila, there was plenty for the eyes to take in, and it was not five minutes after they passed the lighthouse before most of the passengers were laughing at some of the queer costumes worn by the people. They passed a craft which Mr. Webb called a passage-boat.
The party embarked in a passage-boat bound for Gravesend, whence they were to proceed on foot to Chatham; the wind was in their favour, and they soon left London behind them, a mere dark mist a giant phantom in the air. Misfortunes, saith the adage, never come singly.
On the second day we reached a marshy and fenny country, which owing to immense quantities of rain which had lately fallen, was completely submerged. At a large town we got on board a kind of passage-boat, crowded with people; it had neither sails nor oars, and those were not the days of steam-vessels; it was a treck-schuyt, and was drawn by horses.
"On the road thither," says he, "about seven miles from hence, at a village called Sutton, they were met by upwards of one Hundred Arm'd Seamen from Parkgate, belonging to different privateers at Liverpool. The alternative route to Liverpool, by passage-boat down the Dee, was both safer and cheaper. Mr.
The value of the gold he had found was paid to him; it was a large sum six hundred dollars. Then Ib of the heath went out, and wandered about in the great city. On the evening before the day he had settled to return with the captain of the passage-boat, Ib lost himself in the streets, and took quite a different turning to the one he wished to follow.
The passage-boat from Bingen had just arrived; and a portly judge from the Danube, a tall, gaunt Prussian officer, a sketching English artist, two University students, and some cloth-merchants, returning from Frankfort fair, were busily occupied at a long table in the centre of the room, at an ample banquet, in which sour-crout, cherry-soup, and savoury sausages were not wanting.
The launch was stopped to enable the party to see his craft. "You can see that his boat is a lot of cocoanuts, a hundred or more, strung together with lines. The raft easily floats the man, with the current, down to the city, where he sells his fruit, and then walks back, or rows in a passage-boat for his fare," Mr. Webb explained forward, and Mr. Gollan aft.
Here, the unwieldy Chinese junk; there, the fast-sailing Chinese passage-boat; now and then, the long snake-like opium-smuggler with his fifty oars; innumerable fishing-boats, all in pairs, with a drag-net extended from the one to the other; country boats of all descriptions passing to and fro, their crews all bent on money-getting, yet, never failing to cast a glance of mingled contempt and scorn at the "Fan qui"; the duck-boats on the river banks, their numerous tenants feeding in the adjacent rice-fields; a succession of little Chinese villages, with groupes of young Celestials staring at him with never-ending wonder; here and there, a tall pagoda rearing its lofty head high above the surrounding scenery, as if conscious of its great antiquity and of the sacred objects for which it was built; the Chinese husbandman with his one-handed plough, drawn by a single wild-looking buffalo; smiling cottages, surrounded with orange and other fruit-trees; the immense fleet of foreign ships anchored at Whampoa; these and a thousand other objects, all equally strange and new, attract the attention of the stranger as he sails up the "Quang Tung" river.
My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was amused by the contents of the passage-boat. which crosses the river once or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg.
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