the same.  Yet even I have seen the bowsprits and jib-booms of the Australian packets diminish down the quays of the East Dock as an arcade; and of that West Dock there is a boy who well remembers its quays buried under the largess of the tropics and the Spanish Main, where now, through the colonnades of its warehouse supports, the vistas are empty.  Once you had to squeeze sideways through the stacked merchandise.  There were huge hogsheads of sugar and hillocks of coconuts.  Molasses and honey escaped to spread a viscid carpet which held your feet.  The casual prodigality of it expanded the mind.  Certainly this earth must be a big and cheerful place if it could spread its treasures thus wide and deep in a public place under the sky.  It corrected the impression got from the retail shops for any penniless youngster, with that pungent odour of sugar crushed under foot, with its libations of syrup poured from the plenty of the sunny isles.  Today the quays are bare and deserted, and grass rims the stones of the footway, as verdure does the neglected stone covers in a churchyard.  In the dusk of a winter evening the high and silent warehouses which enclose the mirrors of water enclose too an accentuation of the dusk.  The water might be evaporating in shadows.  The hulls of the few ships, moored beside the walls, become absorbed in the dark.  Night withdraws their substance.  What the solitary wayfarer sees then is the incorporeal presentment of ships.  Dockland expires.  The living and sounding day is elsewhere, lighting the new things on which the young are working.  Here is the past, deep in the obscurity from which time has taken the sun, where only memory can go, and sees but the ineffaceable impression of what once was there.

There is a notable building in our Dock Road, the Board of Trade offices, retired a little way from the traffic behind a screen of plane trees.  Not much more than its parapet appears behind the foliage.  By those offices, on fine evenings, I find one of our ancients, Captain Tom Bowline.  Why he favours the road there I do not know.  It would be a reasonable reason, but occult.  The electric trams and motor buses annoy him.  And not one of the young stokers and deck-hands just ashore and paid off, or else waiting at a likely corner for news of a ship, could possibly know the skipper and his honourable records.  They do not know that once, in that office, Tom was a famous and respected figure.  There he stands at times, outside the place which knew him well, but has forgotten him, wearing his immemorial reefer jacket, his notorious tall white hat and his humorous trousers—­short, round, substantial columns—­with a broad line of braid down each leg.