dage,
and swayed wildly the loose gear aloft. Towering hulls were ranged
down each side of a lagoon that ended in vacancy. The rigging and
funnels of the fleet were unrelated; those ships were phantom and
monstrous. They seemed on too great a scale to be within human
control. We felt diminished and a little fearful, as among the looming
urgencies of a dream. The forms were gigantic but vague, and they were
seen in a smother of the elements; and their sounds, deep and mournful,
were like the warnings of something alien, yet without form, which we
knew was adverse, but could not recall when awake again. We remember,
that day, a few watchers insecure on an exposed dockhead that projected
into a sullen dreariness of river and mud which could have been the
finish of the land. At the end of a creaking hawser was a steamer
canting as she backed to head downstream--now she was exposed to a
great adventure--the tide rapid and noisy on her plates, the reek from
her funnel sinking over the water. And from the dockhead, in the
fuddle of a rain-squall, we were waving a handkerchief, probably to the
wrong man, till the vessel went out where all was one--rain, river,
mud, and sky, and the future.

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 ou