His face is weather-stained still, and though his hair is white, it has the form of its early black and abundant vitality.  As long ago as 1885 he landed from his last ship, and has been with us since, watching the landmarks go.  “The sea,” he said to me once, “the sea has gone.  When I look down this road and see it so empty—­(the simple truth is it was noisy with traffic)—­I feel I’ve overstayed my time allowance.  My ships are firewood and wreckage, my owners are only funny portraits in offices that run ten-thousand-ton steamers, and the boys are bones.  Poplar?  This isn’t Poplar.  I feel like Robinson Crusoe—­only I can’t find a footprint in the place.”

It is for the young to remember there is no decay, though change, sometimes called progress, resembles it, especially when your work is finished and you are only waiting and looking on.  When Captain Tom is in that mood we go to smoke a pipe at a dockhead.  It will be high tide if we are in luck, and the sun will be going down to give our River majesty, and a steamer will be backing into the stream, outward bound.  The quiet of a fine evening for Tom, and the great business of ships and the sea for me.  We see the steamer’s captain and its pilot leaning over the bridge, looking aft towards the River.  I think the size of their vessel is a little awful to Tom.  He never had to guide so many thousand tons of steel and cargo into a crowded waterway.  But those two young fellows above know nothing of the change; they came with it.  They are under their spell, thinking their world, as once Tom did his, established and permanent.  They are keeping easy pace with the movement, and so do not know of it.  Tom, now at rest, sitting on a pierhead bollard, sees the world leaving him, going ahead past his cogitating tobacco smoke.  Let it go.  We, watching quietly from our place on the pier-head, are wiser than the moving world in one respect.  We know it does not know whence it is moving, nor why.  Well, perhaps its presiding god, who is determined the world shall go round, would be foolish to tell us.

The sun has dropped behind the black serration of the western city.  Now the River with all the lower world loses substance, becomes vaporous and unreal.  Moving so fast then?  But the definite sky remains, a hard dome of glowing saffron based on thin girders of iron clouds.  The heaven alone is trite and plain.  The wharves, the factories, the ships, the docks, all the material evidence of hope and industry, merge into a dim spectral show in which a few lights burn, fumbling with ineffectual beams in dissolution.  Out on the River a dark body moves past; it has bright eyes, and hoots dismally as it goes.