'Then he began laughing fit to kill himself, and in between the laughs he said, "Fifteen," and I said, just like Small, "She's yours, and you've got a bargain." And he laughed again, and said, "I have." I hope you're not vexed, dad, at me doing this on my own. I've been feeling very anxious ever since, for she must have been a really valuable little thing—he's not the man to be deceived; they say he's the best judge of stock in the country. I told Daly about it, and he wanted to know if Stevenson was drunk at the time. He doesn't drink at all, does he? But I thought you'd agree that the fifteen would be more use to us now than twenty-five later, and that's why I closed with him. I'm sending five down in this, thinking it will come in usefully for you. And Hermie and Miss Browne have gone off to Wilgandra to get new dresses and cups and sheets and whips of other things with the rest. You should have seen their list. The mater and Challis'll think we're no end of swells after all.'
CHAPTER XIV
Home to the Harbour
'City of ships!
City of the world! (for all races are here,
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
Spring up, O city—not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
War, red war is my song through your streets, O city!'
Down through the excited waters of the harbour came the great ship Utopia, the fussy little tug running on ahead.
Away near the Heads the stretching blue had danced almost as unfurrowed by the lines of boats as outside, where the ocean's ways lay wild.
But as the ship came down, down closer to the city, a stately untroubled belle on the arm of her hot, nervous, fidgety little partner, many of the passengers felt with astonishment they had never seen so many watercraft in all their lives before. Rowing boats—scores and scores of them! They looked like flies on an agitated surface of translucent honey. Sailing boats! Surely not one stitch of canvas owned by the city was out of use. Poised, waiting, up and down, everywhere, you felt there was going to be a storm and these were the white gulls come in flocks to flutter and dip and rise till it began. The ferry-boats! They went their hurried journeys to and from—across to North Shore, to Mosman's, and Neutral Bay, to Manly, and you could fancy they were looking over their shoulders all the way and longing to come back. The ocean-going boats, leaning at the Woolloomooloo wharves or anchored out in the stream, they were black with eager people, and waved from every point long strings of brilliant flags—the flags of half the world. America was there, shaking out her Stars and Stripes from a mail steamer, a San Francisco timber-boat passing along to a berth in Darling Harbour, and a transport come to take stores for the army in the Philippines.
From one of the men-of-war in Farm Cove floated Japan's white flag with its red chrysanthemum; France had her war-ship, with its red, white, and blue ensign, also in the cove. All the others, half a dozen of them, floated the white ensign of England.
Up at the quay lay the mammoth Friedrich der Grosse, Germany's black, red, and white ensign flying in the wind amid her gay strings of bunting, and round the corner, in Darling Harbour, among the boats that had come down heavily laden from the rivers, the boats from all the other colonies and Fiji and Noumea. Russia and Norway both were represented.
And the city—had the City of Blue Waves gone mad?