l's_ bows, where the same throwing of ropes took place, but this
time for a stout hawser to be fastened to the rope which had come
through the air in rings. Then the rope was hauled back, the stout
hawser dragged aboard, a great loop at its end placed over a hook on the
tug-boat, which went slowly ahead, the hawser tightened, slackened, and
splashed in the water, tightened and slackened again and again, till the
great steamer's inertia was overcome without the hawser being parted,
and kept by the tug at the side from swinging here and there, the great
ship went grandly down the Thames.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

HOW MARK HAD A SURPRISE.

Blackwall and Woolwich, Gravesend, and the vessel moored for the night.
There a few preliminaries were adjusted, and the next morning, with the
deck not quite in such a state of confusion, the vessel began to drop
down with the tide.

And now Mark woke to the fact that the captain was once more only a
secondary personage on board, the pilot taking command, under whose
guidance sails dropped down and the great ship gradually made her way in
and out of the dangerous shoals and sand-banks, till, well out to sea on
a fine calm day, the pilot-boat came alongside, and Captain Strong, as
the pilot wished him a lucky voyage, again took command.

There had been so much going on in lashing spars in their places,
getting down the last of the cargo, and securing the ship's boats, along
with a hundred other matters connected with clearing the decks and
making things ship-shape, that Mark saw little of his father and the
officers, except at mealtimes; and hence he was thrown almost entirely
in the company of his mother. There were the passengers, but they, for
the most part, were somewhat distant and strange at first; but now, as
the great ship began to go steadily down channel, before a pleasant
south-easterly breeze, the decks were clear, ropes coiled down, hatches
battened over, and there was a disposition among the strangers on board
to become friendly.

They were not a very striking party whom Captain Strong had gathered
round his table, but, as he told Mrs Strong, he had to make the best of
them. There was a curiously dry-looking Scotch merchant on his way back
to Hong-Kong. An Irish major, with his wife and daughter, bound for the
same place. A quiet stout gentleman, supposed to be a doctor, and three
young German agricultural students on their way to Singapore, from which
place, after a