If there are any inland shops which can hold one longer than the place where that ship’s portrait hangs, then I do not know them.  That comes from no more, of course, than the usual fault of an early impression.  That fault gives a mould to the mind, and our latest thoughts, which we try to make reasonable, betray that accidental shape.  It may be said that I looked into this window while still soft.  The consequence, everybody knows, would be incurable in a boy who saw sextants for the first time, compasses, patent logs, sounding-machines, signalling gear, and the other secrets of navigators.  And not only those things.  There was a section given to books, with classics like Stevens on Stowage, and Norie’s Navigation, volumes never seen west of Gracechurch Street.  The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and were sorted by chance. Knots and Splices, Typee, Know Your Own Ship, the South Pacific Directory, and Castaway on the Auckland Islands.  There were many of them, and they were in that fortuitous and attractive order.  The back of every volume had to be read, though the light was bad.  On one wall between the windows a specimen chart was framed.  Maps are good; but how much better are charts, especially when you cannot read them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering!  About the coast line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lines which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart is blank, being beyond soundings.  At the capes are red dots, with arcs on the seaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real lights at night.  Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and mates’ receipts in their pockets, being on errands to shipowners, look outward, and only seem to look inward.  Where are the confines of London?

Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or used to be, an archway into a courtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with half-models of sailing ships.  I remember the name of one, the Winefred.  Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on each.  There was a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand, desks made secret with high screens, and a silence that might have been the reproof to intruders of a repute remembered in dignity behind the screens by those who kept waiting so unimportant a visitor as a boy.  On the counter was a stand displaying sailing cards, announcing, among other events in London River, “the fine ship Blackadder for immediate dispatch, having most of her cargo engaged, to Brisbane.”  And in those days, just round the corner in Billiter Street, one of the East India Company’s warehouses survived, a sombre relic among the new limestone and red granite offices, a massive archway in its centre leading, it could be believed, to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth century, and forgotten.  I never saw anybody go into it, or come out.  How could they?  It