Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/122

 it at all. It—it looks like Gibraltar!"

So she came through the gates of the Mediterranean, a gentle breeze behind her, "sails all filled and asleep" as the seamen said, a swift slender hull under a cloud of snowy canvas. She pushed into the straits where had plied back and forth the daring Phoenician craft, the Roman galleys and the high-pooped ships of Venice and of Spain, but she was no lesser vessel than any one of them, for she was the first of the Yankee clipper ships!

I have never seen those North African cities, Tangier and Tunis and the rest, and I have no doubt that to-day they are very little like what Humphrey Reynolds saw. But his stories have come down to me so clear and vivid, that I almost feel that I have known those very places with their white houses, their tropical green, the confusion and chatter of foreign tongues in the narrow streets, the hushed silence of the wide, walled gardens. For long months the American warships would lie oft these ports, keeping a watchful eye upon the doings of the dusky potentates and arch-pirates who ruled them. The officers and men would go ashore to stare at the strange sights and to bargain for souvenirs among the street vendors, seemingly oblivious of the scowling, hostile faces about them.

It was in Tripoli on a day when Captain Reynolds was walking from one dark cupboard