‘There’s no finer ship out of London,’ said the waterman. ‘She’s from Australey. That’s where the gents yah’re going to visit are sent to. If there’s naught but nettles to be blowed out of dead convicts there’s blisterin’ fine cities to be growed out of live ones. I’m going to Australey myself some of these here days--just to take a look ’round--work my way out and home again. A shilling a month ’ud do. I’m no sailor man.’ He sank into silence. The _Childe Harold_ floated away astern, and now right ahead of us and near loomed the giant figure of the prison-hulk _Warrior_, her head pointing toward London. Another hulk lay moored close by. All these hulks, those off the Arsenal, as well as those off the Dockyard, were as familiar to me as the fingers of my hand. Over and over again had I passed them and looked at them during my lonely pleasant jaunts upon the river, but always with an incurious eye; but a new, deep, fearful significance had now to my gaze entered the grim and hideous fabric of the mountainous _Warrior_. I viewed the rows of ports savagely and massively grated, and thought of the many eyes of crime and suffering, of guilt--and, O my God! of innocence too--which might have peered through those metal meshes at the outside scene of flowing river, with the spirit of liberty strong in the speeding craft, in the flight of the cloud, in the feathering of the hissing ripple. She was a hideous ship, horrible in her suggestions of human crime and despair. Rows of coarse convict linen fluttered betwixt her pole masts, at the head of the foremost of which streamed the long pennon of the State. She was bulged up all about the bows with rude band-box-like buildings; cowled ventilating-shafts gaped above her decks; the dull gleam of gilt and glass about her vast quarter-galleries and stern affected the imagination as a faded memorial of times when her sides bristled with the black dogs of war, when her copper sheathing trembled like a glance of sunset under her, when she lifted star-searching spires to the sky, space upon space of symmetric whiteness swelling soft as sifted snow to the glittering buttons of her trucks.