make us return to their fishpond and commence angling all over again!" concluded the Polderian philosopher, without in any other way epiloguing this edifying episode. And in recognition of their kindness he treated them to a round of gin.
Laurent learned to know queer chaps, even more eccentric than these loafers, on his trips with Vincent Tilbak, who took one or another of the river clerks down to meet an arrival in his boat. Having weighed anchor, the oarsman could only scull at first, in order to make his way out of the basin and the roadstead without crashing into barges and boats at anchor. The yawl passed between two ships whose dead hulks resembled somnolent whales having the winking ship lights for eyes. Then Tilbak began to row quickly. An intermittent silence, more impressive than absolute calm, hovered above the earth and the sky. Laurent listened to the grinding of the oars in the oarlocks, to the drip of the water from the blades, to the plashing of the water under the keel. From time to time a "Who goes there?" came from a custom-house launch searching for smugglers. The name and the voice of Tilbak made the excise men more sociable. At Doe! they passed the night, according to the season, in the common room of the frugal inn, a hut built of tarred wood, or beneath the stars, on the grassy dike.
There they met a fraudulent crowd of industrious time-servers whom Laurent had leisure to observe minutely. Unlicensed brokers, couriers, dragomen for places of ill repute, or, of a still lower rank, defaulting pilots' apprentices, discharged stewards' boys, wharf rats come from the reformatory, young fish from the penitentiary, usually called "runners." Beardless, sharp-witted youths, they were as greatly given to
