A NEW CANTERBURY PILGRIM.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19482, 1 December 1928, Page 13

A NEW CANTERBURY PILGRIM.

! LAST STAGES. (SPSCIALLT WBITTEH TOB THH FBE3S j [By Ngaio Marsh.] Las Palmas is a place of jabbering hawkers in dangerous little boats, of noise, argument, bad fruit and cheap shawls. What it may be like ashore I have no idea for I never got beyond the deafening traffic of the harbour. It has a look of dusty, white, exhausted grandeur backed by hills that are as sunbaked and uncompromising as our own ?Port Hills in mid-summer. Ten minutes after we had anchored in the stream the orderly and circumspect decks of our ship were given up to pandemonium. A fleet of small dinghies bobbed alongside laden with a ■■multitude of highly coloured objects for barter. T! were held up, extolled, derided, sent up in baskets, returned amidst noisy vituperation, flourished anew, and haggled and shouted over until one felt that one .would not accept as gifts. Swarthy-faced merchants shouted and scolded, shivering Spanish youths dived for silver coins, and passengers lost 3;heir heads and their loney in a sort of frenzy of barter. Presently a bJi'rgelike boat, of considerable size, shoved ousting all the smaller fry in ♦its neighbourhood, a ladder was lpwered, land up came a Grand Opera gentleman, with six of his supporting chorus and a flood of merch ndise. This was the famous Josfi, recognised for his superior integrity, by the P. and 0. Company. A little later arrived a serio-comic policeman d.essed in dirty white, wearing a sword, and looking the picture of uneasiness. The Commander appeared, at this juncture, in a state of cold fury at the desecration of his ship and at his Sown impotence to deal with the swarm 'of lesser merchants, who were all hurryr. j up the ladde- before it was drawn away. A good many turned back on being threatened with the hose, but the others who were already aboard all swore vehemently that their names were Jos6, to a man. "Draw your sword" bellowed the Commander to the trembling policeman who pretended not to unde stand him. The Commander then drew it for him and he took it in his left hand and j ran away quicftly. "Lot of diiVr swine!" rumbled the Commander. ' If I had my way I'd wash the whole lot ov rb'oard." . T As the hour of departure drew near 'the traffic became more and more frenzied, and the passengers more and more exhausted. Long after the Josds had been thrust overboard baskets still went up and down between the decks and the dinghies. It was past nightfall when we sailed, and lanterns, hung on the prows of the little boats, cast a new glamour over the vivid colour of the product. of Birmingham _ and Czecho-Slovakia. My last impression of Las Palmas is of -a little sad eyed marmoset who sat in the prow of a boat gazing up at the big ship while his owners cogitated over the day's trade. It is a relief to be at sea again. Th" strangest experience, of all this long voyage, has been my sudden poignant realisation that we were in Northern seas. This feeling, doubly odd for a New Zealander, seemed to come upon all of us one morning, and at about the same time. The games stopped, the constitutionalists left off walking, and the fl eck chair habitues got up and wandered to the rail. The tranquil ocean was a sort of silvery grey that never blesses the Pacific. A light fog hung over it and one could not see very ! far. On the port side a small sailing • vessel was slipping avvay into mist ana. looked less ponderable than the sea gulls who hung sijently in our wake. The day was quit<T warm, and tha air soft, with only a faint tang of the sea in it. All the noisc3 of the ship were subdued and people spoke quietly as if a kind of gentleness had fallen, (Upon them. ' r - "We are getting near the top of tne world again," said a young Englishman. "It's always like this in the North Sea." Suddenly I knew we were in the old vikings' highways, and the spell (f the North and the breath ■of England herself seemed to come out there to us. At dawn the next morning we sighted the Isle of Wight, ana then, through the mist, whito cliffs. Anchorage. Late last evening as we anchored a.t the Nore Jineone was singing: "Soon we'll be in London town, (Sing me lads yev-ho) And see the King in his golden * crown." (Sing me lads yev-ho) The shore' lights shone outside in the dark, and all night we lay in Thames water, getting under way long before dawn. I was on deck at four o'clock and saw a great timber yard fire at Gravesend. All the shipping in the river was lit up by it and looked theatrical and unreal. Then as it grew lighter we slipped past Woolwich and there were England's green fields — how green—and rows of lovely trees making pictures out of a book about knight errantry. Old, old ships —the Firespite said someone —and great cmodern dockyards, we passed by, and "ugly grey places that were somehow adventurous, and then more green fields and trees. At last, after eight weeks on changing seas, strange countries, and our own little world of eight souls, we came to rest_in the 'King George V. dock in London.

Bibliophiles all over the country (the London correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian" wrote recently) will be affected by the news of the death of Mr Henry Cecil Sotheran as the result of a motor-car accident. In the honourable list of London booksellers the Sotherans have stood high for a century, and before that they were known and respected in York. They celebrated their London centenary in 1916. Among their big operations were the acquisition of the whole of Dickens's library at Gadshill, and it is characteristic of the book market of the time and its difference from now that the books were sold for shillings instead of pounds, and even Dickens's own copy of Ben Jonson's "Every Man in His Humour" was sold for thirty shillings. A bigger deal was the purchase of the Althorp Library, now in the Rylands Library, as everyone knows. Mr Sotheran was largely concerned in that gigantic sale, the price paid being £250,000. Three generations of Sotherans have conducted the London business, and now there ia,Jio near relative to carry it on. Whatever changes_ take place, it is to be hoped that their delightful old shop in the Strand will still remain. Maggs's and many other old bookshops of the district have gone West, as well as Sotheby's book salerooms on the approach to Waterloo bridge, which made the Strand one of the book centres of the world.

Cassell announces "The "World's Anthology of Verse," running to 1500 pages and representing "every style and every mood of the poets of all ages." The -poems taken from other languages than English will appear in Some of the most remarkable of them come from the smaller nation*.