A fat little lascar balanced himself in the jolly-boat outlined against the sky and held aloft a red flag until the hawser swung clear of the propeller, when he raised a white flag above him and stood as motionless as the Statue of Liberty, while the Sutlej cleared Europa Point of Gibraltar and headed towards the East. Then he pattered across the deck and leaned over the side and crooned in a lazy, barbarous monotone to the waves. The sun fell upon the boat like a spell and turned us into sleepy and indolent fixtures wherever it first found us, and showed us the white-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada of Spain to the north, and the dim blue mountains of Africa to the south. The deck below was scrubbed as white as a bread-board, and the masts and rigging threw black shadows on the awning overhead, and on every side the blue Mediterranean and the bluer Mediterranean sky met and sparkled and reflected each other's brilliancy like mirrors placed face to face.
For four days the sun greeted the Sutlej by day and the moon by night, and the coast of Africa played hide-and-seek along her starboard side, disappearing in a white mist of cloud for an hour or so, and then running along with us again in comfortable proximity. On the other side boats passed at almost as frequent intervals, and at such friendly range that one could count the people on the decks and read their flag signals without a glass. The loneliness of the North Atlantic, where an iceberg stands for land, and only an occasional tramp steamer rests the eye, is as different to this sea as a railroad journey over the prairie is to the jaunt from New York to Washington. On the second night out we see Algiers, glowing and sparkling in the night like a million of fire-flies, and with the clear steady eye of the light-house warning us away, as though the quarantine had not warned some of us away already. And on the third night we pass Cape Bon, and can imagine Tunis lying tantalizingly near us, behind its light-house, shut off also by the quarantine that the cholera at Marseilles has made imperative wherever the French line of steamers touch. By this time the twoscore passengers have foregathered as they would never have done had they all been Americans, or had there been three hundred of them, and their place of meeting the deck of a transatlantic steamer instead of one of this picturesque fleet, upon which you expect strange things to happen.
MALTESE PEDDLERS
When an American goes to sea, he reads books, or he calculates the number of tons of coal it is taking to run the vessel at that rate of speed, and he determines that rate of speed by counting the rise and fall of the piston-rod, with his watch in his hand; and when this ceases to amuse him he plays cards in the smoking-room or holds pools on the run and on the pilot's number. The Englishman joins in these latter amusements, because nothing better offers. But when his foot is on his native heath or on the deck of one of his own vessels, he demonstrates his preference for that sort of entertainment which requires exercise and little thought. If it is at a country-house, he plays games which entail considerable running about, and at picnics he enjoys "Throw the handkerchief," and on board ship he plays cricket and other games dear to the heart of the American at the age of five. This is partly because he always exercises and likes moving about, as Americans do not, and because the reading of books (except such books as Mr. Potter of Texas, which, I firmly believe, every Englishman I ever met has read, and upon which they have bestowed the most unqualified approval as the truest picture of American life and character they have ever found) entertains him for but a very short period at a time.
So a netting is placed about the upper deck for him, and he plays cricket; not only he, but his wife and his sister and his mother and the unattached young ladies under the captain's care, who are going out to India, presumably to be met at the wharf by prospective husbands. There is something most charming in the absolute equality which this sport entails, and the seriousness with which the English regard it. We could not in America expect a white-haired lady with spectacles to bowl overhand, or to see that it is considered quite as a matter of course that she should do it by the member of the last Oxford eleven, nor would our young women be able to hold a hot ball, or to take it with the hands crossed and only partly open, and not palm to palm and wide apart. An American, as a rule, walks in order that he may reach a certain point, but the Englishman walks for the sake of the walking. And he plays games, also, apparently for the exercise there is in them; games in which people sit in a circle and discuss whether love or reason should guide them in going into matrimony do not appeal to him so strongly as do "Oranges and lemons," or "Where are you, Jacob?" which is a very fine game, in which an early training in sliding to bases gives you a certain advantage. It is certainly instructive to hear a captain who got his company through storming Fort Nilt last year in the Pamir inquire, anxiously, "Oranges or lemons? Yes, I know. But which should I say, old chap? I'm a little rusty in the game, you know." If people can get back to the days when they were children by playing games, or in any other way, no one can blame them.
The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on the fourth day—a yellow rib of rock on the right, with houses and temples on it—and demonstrated how few days of water are necessary to rob one's memory of the usual look of a house. One would imagine by the general interest in them that we had spent the last few years of our lives in tents, or in the arctic regions under huts of snow and ice. And then the ship heads in towards Malta, and instead of dropping anchor and waiting for a tender, glides calmly into what is apparently its chief thoroughfare. It is like a Venice of the sea, and you feel as though you were intruding in a gentleman's front yard. The houses and battlements and ramparts lie close on either side, so near that one could toss a biscuit into the hands of the Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives lounging on the steps that run from the front doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms reach above the line of the house-tops, and the bowsprit seems to threaten havoc with the window-panes of the custom-house. We are not apparently entering a harbor, but steaming down the main street of a city—a city of yellow limestone, with streets, walls, houses, and waste places all of yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturbance we are making, be moving forward in a bark canoe, and not in an ocean steamer drawing twenty-five feet of water. And then when the anchor drops, dozens of little boats, yellow and green and blue, with high posts at the bow and sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the steps, and their owners clamor for the proud privilege of carrying us over the few feet of water which runs between the line of houses and the ship's sides.
