The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier¹ at Calais. A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide ebbing² out towards low water-mark. There had been no more water on the bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar itself, with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy marine³ monster just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly shown as it lay asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard as if it were the ghost of an edifice⁴ that had once had colour and rotundity, dropped melancholy⁵ tears after its late buffeting⁶ by the waves. The long rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral garlands of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might have represented an unsightly marine cemetery⁷. Every wave-dashed, storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey sky, in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines of surf, making at it ferociously⁸, that the wonder was there was any Calais left, and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded long ago to the undermining and besieging⁹ sea, like the fortifications children make on the sea-shore.

After slipping among oozy¹⁰ piles and planks¹¹, stumbling up wet steps and encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered on their comfortless

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