It is afterwards that so strange an ending to a brief journey from a City station is seen to have had more in it than the time-table, hurriedly scanned, gave away.  Or it would be remembered as strange, if the one who had to make that journey as much as thought of it again; for perhaps to a stranger occupied with more important matters it was passed as being quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and rather dismal, the usual boredom of a duty.  Its strangeness depends, very likely, as much on an idle and squandering mind as on the ships, the River, and the gasometers.  Yet suppose you first saw the River from Blackwall Stairs, in the days when the windows of the Artichoke Tavern, an ancient, weather-boarded house with benches outside, still looked towards the ships coming in!  And how if then, one evening, you had seen a Blackwall liner haul out for the Antipodes while her crew sang a chanty!  It might put another light on the River, but a light, I will admit, which others should not be expected to see, and if they looked for it now might not discover, for it is possible that it has vanished, like the old tavern.  It is easy to persuade ourselves that a matter is made plain by the light in which we prefer to see it, for it is our light.

One day, I remember, a boy had to take a sheaf of documents to a vessel loading in the London Dock.  She was sailing that tide.  It was a hot July noon.  It is unlucky to send a boy, who is marked by all the omens for a City prisoner, to that dock, for it is one of the best of its kind.  He had not been there before.  There was an astonishing vista, once inside the gates, of sherry butts and port casks.  On the flagstones were pools of wine lees.  There was an unforgettable smell.  It was of wine, spices, oakum, wool, and hides.  The sun made it worse, but the boy, I think, preferred it strong.  After wandering along many old quays, and through the openings of dark sheds that, on so sunny a day, were stored with cool night and cubes and planks of gold, he found his ship, the Mulatto Girl.  She was for the Brazils.  Now it is clear that one even wiser in shipping affairs than a boy would have expected to see a craft that was haughty and portentous when bound for the Brazils, a ship that looked equal to making a coast of that kind.  There she was, her flush deck well below the quay wall.  A ladder went down to her, for she was no more than a schooner of a little over one hundred tons.  If that did not look like the beginning of one of those voyages reputed to have ended with the Elizabethans, then I am trying to convey a wrong impression.  On the deck of the Mulatto Girl was her master, in shirt and trousers and a remarkable straw hat more like a canopy, bending over to discharge some weighty words into the hatch.  He rose and looked up at the boy on the quay, showing then a taut black beard and formidable eyes.  With his hands on his hips, he surveyed for a few seconds, without