I fancy there were poplar-trees at a place called Poplar, and that I thought it must be called after them; but Fred says No, and we have never been there since, so I cannot be sure about it.  If not, I must have dreamt it.

I did fall asleep in the corner, I know, I was so very much tired, and we had had no breakfast, and I sat on the side where the wind blows in, which I think helped to make me sleepy.  I was wakened partly by the pie-dish slipping off my lap, and partly by Fred saying in an eager tone,

“Oh, Charlie!  LOOK! Are they all ships?”

We stuffed our heads through the window, and my hat was nearly blown away, so the man with the black face and the white jacket gave it to the woman with the troublesome baby to take care of for me, and he held us by our legs for fear we should fall out.

On we flew!  There was wind enough in our faces to have filled the barge-sail three times over, and Fred licked his lips and said, “I do believe there’s salt in it!”

But what he woke me up to show me drove me nearly wild.  When I had seen a couple of big barges lying together with their two bare masts leaning towards each other I used to think how dignified and beautiful they looked.  But here were hundreds of masts, standing as thick as tree-trunks in a fir-wood, and they were not bare poles, but lofty and slender, and crossed by innumerable yards, and covered with ropes in orderly profusion, which showed in the sunshine as cobwebs shine out in a field in summer.  Gay flags and pennons fluttered in the wind; brown sails, grey sails, and gleaming white sails went up and down; and behind it all the water sparkled and dazzled our eyes like the glittering reflections from a mirror moving in the sun.

As we ran nearer the ropes looked thicker, and we could see the devices on the flags.  And suddenly, straining his eyes at the yards of a vessel in the thick of the ship-forest, on which was something black, like a spider with only four legs, Fred cried, “It’s a sailor!”

I saw him quite well.  And seeing him higher up than on any tree one could ever climb, with the sunny sky above him and the shining water below him, I could only mutter out with envious longing—­“How happy he must be!”

CHAPTER XIII.

A DIRTY STREET—­A BAD BOY—­SHIPPING AND MERCHANDISE—­WE STOWAWAY ON BOARD THE ’ATALANTA’—­A SALT TEAR.

The man in the white jacket helped us out, smiling as he did so, so that his teeth shone like ivory in his black face.  We took the pie-dish and our bundles, and thanked him very much, and the train went on and took him with it, which we felt sorry for.  For when one is out in the world, you know, one sometimes feels rather lonely, and sorry to part with a kind friend.

Everybody else went through a little gate into the street, so we did the same.  It was a very dirty street, with houses on one side and the railway on the other.  There were cabbages and carrots and old shoes and fishes’ heads and oyster-shells and potato-peelings in the street, and a goat was routing among it all with its nose, as if it had lost something and hoped to find it by and by.