riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of townships that
were long since torn to fragments and submerged in these new growths.
And amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensive
desire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one feels that the
pressure of commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, and
first this man made a wharf and that erected a crane, and then this
company set to work and then that, and so they jostled together to make
this unassimilable enormity of traffic. Through it we dodged and drove
eager for the high seas.

I remember how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name of a London
County Council steamboat that ran across me. Caxton it was called, and
another was Pepys, and another was Shakespeare. They seemed so wildly
out of place, splashing about in that confusion. One wanted to take them
out and wipe them and put them back in some English gentleman's library.
Everything was alive about them, flash ing, splashing, and passing,
ships moving, tugs panting, hawsers taut, barges going down with men
toiling at the sweeps, the water all a-swirl with the wash of shipping,
scaling into millions of little wavelets, curling and frothing under the
whip of the unceasing wind. Past it all we drove. And at Greenwich to
the south, you know, there stands a fine stone frontage where all the
victories are recorded in a Painted Hall, and beside it is the "Ship"
where once upon a time those gentlemen of Westminster used to have
an annual dinner--before the port of London got too much for them
altogether. The old facade of the Hospital was just warming to the
sunset as we went by, and after that, right and left, the river opened,
the sense of the sea increased and prevailed, reach after reach from
Northfleet to the Nore.

And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the eastern
sea. You speed up and tear the oily water louder and faster, siroo,
siroo-swish-siroo, and the hills of Kent--over which I once fled from
the Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp--fall away on the right hand
and Essex on the left. They fall away and vanish into blue haze, and
the tall slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowing
sturdy tugs, are all wrought of wet gold as one goes frothing by. They
stand out, bound on strange missions of life and death, to the killing
of men in unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and the
phantom flash of unseen lights, and presently even