But to the old home now the last of the sailing fleet is loyal.  We have enough still to show what once was there; the soft gradations of a ship’s entrance, rising into bows and bowsprit, like the form of a comber at its limit, just before it leaps forward in collapse.  The mounting spars, alive and braced.  The swoop and lift of the sheer, the rich and audacious colours, the strange flags and foreign names.  South Sea schooner, whaling barque from Hudson’s Bay, the mahogany ship from Honduras, the fine ships and barques that still load for the antipodes and ’Frisco.  Every season they diminish, but some are still with us.  At Tilbury, where the modern liners are, you get wall sides mounting like great hotels with tier on tier of decks, and funnels soaring high to dominate the day.  There the prospect of masts is a line of derrick poles.  But still in the upper docks is what will soon have gone for ever from London, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with sometimes a white sail floating in it like a cloud.  We had a Russian barquentine there yesterday.  I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships, the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse spars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered lift skywards of main and mizzen poles.  The model of this Russian ship was as memorable as a Greek statue.  It is a ship’s sheer which gives loveliness to her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, finely poised, sure of herself, in profile.  She was so slight a body, so tall and slender, but standing alert and illustriously posed, there was implied in her slenderness a rare strength and swiftness.  And to her beauty of line there went a richness of colour which made our dull parish a notable place.  She was of wood, painted white.  Her masts were of pine, veined with amber.  Her white hull, with the drenchings of the seas, had become shot with ultramarine shadows, as though tinctured with the virtue of the ocean.  The verdigris of her sheathing was vivid as green light; and the languid dock water, the colour of jade, glinting round her hull, was lambent with hues not its own.  You could believe there was a soft radiation from that ship’s sides which fired the water about her, but faded when far from her sides, a delicate and faery light which soon expired.

Such are our distinguished visitors in Dockland, though now they come to us with less frequency.  If the skipper of the Oberon could now look down the Dock Road from the corner by North Street, what he would look for first would be, not, I am sure, what compelled the electric trams, but for the entrance of the East Dock and its familiar tangle of spars.  He would not find it.  The old dock is there, but a lagoon asleep, and but few vessels sleeping with it.  The quays are vacant, except for the discarded lumber of ships, sun-dried boats, rusted cables and anchors, and a pile of broken davits.  The older dock of the West India Merchants is almost