When the stir and bustle on deck became so lively that he was no longer
able to indulge in introspection, he got up and indifferently joined the
moving throng. The warning had sounded for those going ashore, and the
numerous gangways were crowded. Passengers lined the promenade-deck,
shouting and waving to the crowd on the wharf below. From the
bridge-deck the captain could be heard cheerfully swearing through a
megaphone at the second officer below. Chinese deck-stewards glided
about in their felt slippers, trying to attach the right person to the
right steamer-chair. Cabin-boys scurried about with baskets of fruit and
flowers and other sea-going impedimenta that, after one appreciative
glance from the recipient, are usually consigned to the ice-box. All
was noise and confusion.

Percival's critical eye swept the line of human backs that presented
themselves at the railing. The same old types! He could describe them
with his eyes shut: the conventional globe-trotters, avid to obtain and
to impart information; business men comparing statistics and endlessly
discussing the tariff; rich wanderers in quest of health; poor
missionaries in quest of "foreign fields"; fussy Frenchmen; stolid
Germans; a few suspicious-looking Englishmen; and always the ubiquitous
Americans, who had the same effect upon him that a highly colored cloth
has on the delicate sensibilities of a certain large animal.

The most conspicuous example of the last class was a somewhat noisy
young person in a still more resonant steamer-coat who hung at an angle
of forty-five degrees over the railing, and exchanged confidences of a
personal nature with an old man on the wharf twenty feet below. Every
time Percival's walk brought him toward the bow of the boat, his eyes
were offended by that blue-and-lavender steamer-coat and by a pair of
beaded-leather slippers with three straps across the instep and absurdly