The Ten Years' Tenant Author:Walter Besant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL ON TOWER HILL. WE had a favourable voyage of five weeks and two days, with fair werther and no adverse winds until we arrived off the Nore, wher... more »e we were compelled to lie to and anchor in the Roads, together with over a hundred other vessels, small and great, waiting for the wind to change, so that we might beat up the river to the port of London. If I was surprised at the sight of so many ships gathered together in one place, you may think how much more I was astonished as we slowly made our way up the crowded river, and finally dropped anchor in the Pool over against the Tower of London, in the midst of so many masts and such a crowd of ships as, in my ignorance, I had never dreamed of. There were East Indiamen ; dusky colliers; brightly painted traders with France and Spain: prodigious great ships in the Levantine trade, armed with long carronades; round Dutch sloops; with every kind of pinnace, tender, smack, hoy, brig, schooner, yacht, barge, and ferryboat. On all these ships men were running about, loading, unloading, painting, repairing, fetching, carrying, and shouting. There, before my very eyes, rose the White Tower, of which Speed speaks so much; London Bridge was on the left; beyond it the Monument to the Great Fire; then the dome of St. Paul's, and innumerable spires, steeples, and towers of this rich and prosperous city. I remembered, standing on the deck of the ship and seeing all these things for the first time, how we colonists had been accustomed to speak in our boastful way of America's vast plains. Why, is the greatness of a country to be measured by her acres? Then should the Dismal Swamp be more illustrious than Athens, Virginia more considerable than Middlesex, and the Potomac a greater river than the Tiber or the Thames. What have these new...« less