Below the Town Quay in the dark shadow lay the boats--themselves a shadowy crowd, ghostly, with a glimmer of white paint here and there on gunwales, thwarts, stern-sheets.

Their thole-pins had been wrapped with oakum and their crews sat whispering, ready, with muffled oars.

On the Quay, lantern in hand, the Major moved up and down between his silent ranks, watched by a shadowy crowd.
In that crowd, as I am credibly informed, were gathered--but none could distinguish them--gentle and simple, maiden ladies with their servants or housekeepers, side by side with longshoremen, hovellers, giglet maids, and urchins; all alike magnetised and drawn thither by the Man and the Hour.

But the Major recognised none of them.
His dispositions had been made and perfected a full week before; how thoroughly they had been perfected might be read in the mute alacrity with which man after man, squad after squad, without spoken command yet in unbroken order, dissolved out of the ranks and passed down to the boats.

You could not see that Gunner Tippet, being an asthmatical man, wore a comforter and a respirating shield; nor that Sergeant Sullivan, as notoriously susceptible to the night air, carried a case-bottle and a small basket of boiled sausages.