k. Then suddenly
the scarlet of a huge black and scarlet steamer comes along and gives you
the colour without a shred of mystery, without charm, and with the most
definite division. Besides the red, there is nothing that is coloured
except a stack of timber now and then--raw wood with precisely the colours
of a wheatfield in August--and the piled-up hay of a red-sailed barge
loaded down to the water. These are not many on the Sunday river, but
Sunday clears the colours by clearing the air. There is exceedingly little
smoke; its sign is upon the whole river-side, it has re-drawn everything
in black, as a child might go over a water-colour with his black pencils,
but between you and the natural clouds there is nothing but fresh air,
quick with the movement that seems perpetually to follow this grey
waterway. Or now and then, at long intervals, a single flimsy puff of
smoke comes between mast and sky; it is brown, the steam is white, and
the cloud silver grey; and through each of these three with a various
gleam filters the flying sunshine.

Sunday seals the faces of the barns and turns the key upon the leagues of
wharves; but it leaves all the cranes and masts etched in their thousands
upon the low horizon. These make the thicket of the Thames-side, a
deciduous, narrow wood winding east, south-east, and north, and standing
everywhere in its brief winter of a day, having shed sails and burdens and
put away noise. There is nothing in the handsome London of high houses so
delicate as these lifted lances against the sky. Hop-gardens or vineyards,
or the slender rows of sticks that carry pea plants and beans in rustic
gardens, make the same play with light, and let it through as fine a
design.

[Illustration: _A Back Street._]

Here is nothing of the sharp black and white detail that is the most
salient thing in London streets; everything is painted softly; all the
darks are dull; in a word, the scene is simple, and this the streets are
never. It is simplicity, indeed, that makes all the buildings (except only
the 'works' above mentioned) more than tolerable. There are no
advertisements. This means much to eyes too well used to those shreds and
tatters of the wall. That commerce which makes so much paltry show in the
West is here perfectly grave and quiet; it makes serious announcements,
not advertisements, of the things that occupy navies. You see 'Pickles'
and other names that launch a thousand ships, written large ove