round; it looked as though she was bleeding to death. I
suppose it was silly to feel sorry for her, but I did. I thought how
beastly it was that she would never go to sea again, where the waves are
clean and green, even if no rougher than the black waves now raging
around our staunch little bark. I never knew before what lots of kinds
of ships there can be, and I think I could have gone on and on for ever
and ever looking at the shapes of things and the colours they were, and
dreaming about being a pirate, and things like that, but we had come
some way; and now Alice said--

"Oswald, I think Noel will die if we don't make land soon."

And indeed he had been rather bad for some time, only I thought it was
kinder to take no notice.

So our ship was steered among other pirate craft, and moored at a
landing-place where there were steps up.

Noel was now so ill that we felt we could not take him on a Chinese
hunt, and H.O. had sneaked his boots off in the boat, and he said they
hurt him too much to put them on again; so it was arranged that those
two should sit on a dry corner of the steps and wait, and Dora said she
would stay with them.

"I think we ought to go home," she said. "I'm quite sure Father wouldn't
like us being in these wild, savage places. The police ought to find
Pincher."

But the others weren't going to surrender like that, especially as Dora
had actually had the sense to bring a bag of biscuits, which all, except
Noel, were now eating.

"Perhaps they ought, but they _won't_," said Dicky. "I'm boiling hot.
I'll leave you my overcoat in case you're cold."

Oswald had been just about to make the same manly proposal, though he
was not extra warm. So they left their coats, and, with Alice, who would
come though told not to, they climbed the steps, and went along a narrow
passage and started boldly on the Chinese hunt. It was a strange sort of
place over the river; all the streets were narrow, and the houses and
the pavements and the people's clothes and the mud in the road all
seemed the same sort of dull colour--a sort of brown-grey it was.

All the house doors were open, and you could see that the insides of the
houses were the same colour as the outsides. Some of the women had blue,
or violet or red shawls, and they sat on the doorsteps and combed their
children's hair, and shouted things to each other across the street.
They seemed very much struck by the appearance of the three travellers,
and