Their masts towering against the sky, the ships suggested a fantastic forest, or a chimerical orchard, for the undulations of the water imparted to them a gentle motion, so that they seemed to be in the act of shedding their gracious and varied fruits on the wharf. There were skins of mountain goats from Switzerland, and elephant tusks from Egypt; there was oil golden with the sunlight of Italy and there were winecasks bursting with the purple sweetness of her vineyards. There were bales of textile fabrics from China, there were strange-leaved plants, with their roots bound tightly in canvas, from the isles of Bermuda. It seemed to Rachel that all these fruits from every land and clime were treasures poured bounteously into the lap of a mystical city; and the last vestige of that fear, so foreign to her nature and so little to be harboured there in all the coming years, vanished from her heart. Were they not, she asked herself, in the land of fulfilment, in the city of realized dreams? CHAPTER II EMILY SHORT--TOY-MAKER When the bells of St. Joseph trembled into motion, Emily Short opened her eyes; when those inverted cups of bronze began to move faster, flinging their summons over the roofs, tossing it in at open windows, emptying it into narrow courts, she arose. When the parish father, still half asleep, donned his robes and straightened his stole, she put the last pin in her collar and tied on her apron. When he began to say mass, she began to hum a tune; and as the high-sounding Latin escaped through the trefoiled windows, her artless warble escaped through the attic casement, and together the two strains, the one from the heart of the Church and the other from the heart of a woman, ascended straight to the throne of the good God and who shall say they were not equally acceptable? Outwardly Emily was no friend of the church. Its frequent services, she declared, were disturbing, and a room on the other side of the house with a view of the ships and the wharfage would have been a deal more to her mind. However, it was noticeable that whenever one of these rooms fell vacant she held her peace and abode in her attic as tightly as a limpet in its shell when danger is toward. It must be confessed that she clung to the church very much as a limpet clings to its chosen rock. For forty years she had lived close to the church, for forty years been keenly alive to its spirit of consolation. Though unencumbered with a creed, Emily was a staunch reformer and the church represented a strong ally.