Harper's Round Table, June 9, 1896

Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.
It was a morning of yellow fog. The whole world appeared a sheet of shifting, silent ochre. Up beyond the bluff the sallow outlines of the houses faded upward into sinuous curves of restless mist. The sands of the beach looked like a reflection of the fog that wrapped the sea in its curtain of gold. The old pier jutted out an uncertain brown line with sparkles of silver along its wet columns, like the flashes of big guns seen through their own smoke. The swells loomed suddenly out of the yellow curtain with a quick flash of light along their crests, a curving of brown shadows in their hollows, and then a plunge into hissing fields of mellow foam. It was one of those blinding mornings of dead gold, when the fog hangs low over the earth, and the brilliant sun, shining in a clear sky above, forces its intolerable glory downward through the mist. The human eye is helpless on such a day, and seeks vainly for a moment's relief among the sombre shadows in the crannies of the ground. It was just the sort of a day to tempt the Old Sailor to sit on the end of the pier and try to look through the fog. So Henry and George walked down to the old meeting-place, and there they found him gazing into the water with a meditative countenance. As usual, he did not look up when he heard their footsteps, but broke into one of his silent laughs. The boys, without saying a word, sat down beside him, and presently he exclaimed:
W'ich the same you is great navigators. 'Cos w'y, ye can steer straight fur this 'ere pier in thick weather without no obserwations wotsomever, relyin' on dead reckonin' an' general sagaciousness.
The boys held their peace; and presently their friend spoke again:
But that are not so easy fur to do at sea. Leastways ef it was, Cap'n Philander Montgomery Boggs, of the Al Kamakh an' Kangaroo liner Queen O' Spades , wouldn't 'a' made Wakaufoo w'en he were a-steerin' fur Al Kamakh, w'ich the same are on the west coast o' Hindoostan, as any one can tell wot are bin there, an' this 'ere old sailor are him.