They must have been the days to live in, when China was like that, and there was all the East, and such ships, and men who were seamen and navigators in a way that is lost.  As the old master mariner, who had lived in that time, would sometimes demand of me:  What is the sea now?  Steamers do not make time, or lose it.  They keep it.  They run to schedule, one behind the other, in processions.  They have nothing to overcome.  They do not fail, and they cannot triumph.  They are predestined engines, and the sea is but their track.  Yet it had been otherwise.  And the old man would brood into the greater past, his voice would grow quiet, and he would gently emphasize his argument by letting one hand, from a fixed wrist, rise, and fall sadly on the table, in a gesture of solemn finality.  He was in that act, early one evening, while his wife was reading a newspaper; and I had risen to go, and stood for a moment silent in the thought that these of ours were lesser days, and their petty demands and trivial duties made of men but mere attendants on uninspiring process.

Serene Mrs. Williams, reading her paper, and not in our world at all, at that moment struck the paper into her lap, and fixed me with surprise and shock in her eyes, as though she had just repelled that mean print in a malicious attempt at injury.  Her husband took no notice.  She handed me the paper, with a finger on a paragraph.  “The steamer Arab, which sailed on December 26 last for Buenos Aires, has not been heard of since that date, and today was ‘posted’ as missing.”

I remembered then a young man in uniform, with a rakish cap, trying to find a key while a girl was laughing at him.  As I left the house I could see in the dusk, a little down the street, the girl standing at her gate.  The street was empty and silent.  At the end of it the lamp-lighter set his beacon.

IX.  In a Coffee-Shop

With a day of rain, Dockland is set in its appropriate element.  It does not then look better than before, but it looks what it is.  Not sudden April showers are meant, sparkling and revivifying, but a drizzle, thin and eternal, as if the rain were no more than the shadow cast by a sky as unchanging as poverty.  When real night comes, then the street lamps dissolve ochreous hollows in the murk.  It was such a day as that; it was not night, for the street lamps were not alight.  There was no sound.  The rain was as noiseless as the passage of time.  Two other wayfarers were in the street with me.  One had no right there, nor anywhere, and knew it, slinking along with his head and tail held low, trailing a length of string through the puddles.  The other, too, seemed lost.  He was idling as if one street was the same as another, and on that day there was rain in all.  He came towards me, with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar up.  He turned on me briskly, with a sudden decision, when he drew