he was like those fine-looking women men
can't live without, and can't live with. She'd break a man's heart.
When we got back to Blackwall we heard she was sold to foreigners ...
but there she is now, come home to die. I bet old Yeo don't care much
about her troubles, though. He'll break her up, troubles and all, and
she's for firewood ... there you are, my dear, there you are ... but
you should have seen her at Blackwall, in the old days ... what's the
East India Dock Road like, these times?"

The next day, at low water, I stood beneath her, and watched a cascade
pouring incessantly from a patched wound in her side, for she had been
in collision, and that was why she was condemned. She was careened,
like a slain thing, and with the dank rocks and weeds about, and that
monotonous pour from her wound, she might have been a venerable sea
monster from which the life was draining. Yeo hailed me from above, and
up the lively rope ladder I went. She had a Norwegian name, but that
was not her name. All Poplar knew her once. There she was born. She was
one of ours. That stone arch of John Company, the entrance to the East
India Dock, once framed her picture, and her topmasts looked down to
the Dock Road, when she was at home. I could believe Galsworthy. She
was not so empty as she seemed. She had a freight, and Yeo did not know
it. Poplar and the days of the clippers! I knew she was invisibly
peopled. Of course she was haunted.

The shipwrecker and I went about her canted decks, groped through dark
recesses where it might have been the rats we heard, and peered into
the sonorous shades of the empty cargo spaces. In the cabins we puzzled
over those relics left by her last crew, which, without their
associations, seemed to have no reason in them. There was a mocking
silence in the cabins. What sort of men were they who were familiar
with these doors? And before the northmen had her, and she was English,
trim, and flew skysails and studding-sails, and carried lady
passengers, who were the Poplar boys that laughed and yarned here? She
was more mine than Yeo's. Let him claim her timber. All the rich
freight of her past was mine. I was the intimate of every ghost she
had.

We sat in a cabin which had been her skipper's. There was a litter on
the floor of old newspapers and documents, receipts for harbour dues,
the captain's copies of bills of lading, store lists, and some
picture-postcards from the old man's family. A lump of indu