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 resting after a long journey.  And of all the ships in sight, near and far, each was provided with a man, the man without whom the finest ship is a dead thing, a floating and purposeless log.

After his one glance at the roadstead he went on, since there was nothing to turn back for, and the time must be got through somehow.  The avenues of big trees ran straight over the Esplanade, cutting each other at diverse angles, columnar below and luxuriant above.  The interlaced boughs high up there seemed to slumber; not a leaf stirred overhead:  and the reedy cast-iron lampposts in the middle of the road, gilt like scepters, diminished in a long perspective, with their globes of white porcelain atop, resembling a barbarous decoration of ostriches’ eggs displayed in a row.  The flaming sky kindled a tiny crimson spark upon the glistening surface of each glassy shell.

With his chin sunk a little, his hands behind his back, and the end of his stick marking the gravel with a faint wavering line at his heels, Captain Whalley reflected that if a ship without a man was like a body without a soul, a sailor without a ship was of not much more account in this world than an aimless log adrift upon the sea.  The log might be sound enough by itself, tough of fiber, and hard to destroy—­but what of that!  And a sudden sense of irremediable idleness weighted his feet like a great fatigue.

A succession of open carriages came bowling along the newly opened sea-road.  You could see across the wide grass-plots the discs of vibration made by the spokes.  The bright domes of the parasols swayed lightly outwards like full-blown blossoms on the rim of a vase; and the quiet sheet of dark-blue water, crossed by a bar of purple, made a background for the spinning wheels and the high action of the horses, whilst the turbaned heads of the Indian servants elevated above the line of the sea horizon glided rapidly on the paler blue of the sky.  In an open space near the little bridge each turn-out trotted smartly in a wide curve away from the sunset; then pulling up sharp, entered the main alley in a long slow-moving file with the great red stillness of the sky at the back.  The trunks of mighty trees stood all touched with red on the same side, the air seemed aflame under the high foliage, the very ground under the hoofs of the horses was red.  The wheels turned solemnly; one after another the sunshades drooped, folding their