Chapter IX
THE Peninsular and Oriental single-screw, warranted not to make over ten knots an hour, old-type (by the saloon aft) steamship Rohilla lay in the crater-like basin of Hong-Kong harbor, with three feet of her sheathing out forward and a foot of it out aft. Two yellow-white awninged launches, fat as grub-worms in the bows, smelled at her starboard side. The Rohilla was taking in, with grunts and crashes, the perishable freight for Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama. The harbor swarmed with evil-smelling junks and sampans. War-ships of France, England, Germany, and Russia, compact as watches, of dirtied colors but extreme cleanliness and threatening design, rode in the harbor, and rose above the huddling junks as unfeelingly as rob-
