Above these hills the white lighthouse loomed, the heated
air trembling around it, and giving it so vague and misty a guise that,
being by itself a thing of night and storm and darkness, it looked now as
unreal as a ghost by daylight. On the other side of the harbor lay the
marshes, threaded by steaming creeks, up which here and there the pointed
sails of the hidden hay-barges crept, the sunshine turning them to white
flames: farther off stood a screen of woods, and from brim to brim between
swelled the broad, smooth sheet of the river, coming from the great
mountains that gave it birth, washing clean a score of towns on its way,
and loitering just here by the pleasant old fishing-town, whose wharves,
once doing a mighty business with the Antilles and the farther Indies,
now, in the absence of their half dozen foreign-going craft, lay at the
mercy of any sand-droger that chose to fling her cable round their
capstans. A few idle masts swayed there, belonging to small fishers and
fruiters, a solid dew of pitch oozing from their sides in the sun, but not
a sail set: a lonely watchman went the rounds among them, a ragged urchin
bobbed for flounders in the dock, but otherwise wharves and craft were
alike forsaken, and the sun glared down on them as though his rays had
made them a desert.
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