at service which was
traditional to the parish. Tokens that now are dusty and in their
night, understood only by the few who also belong to the past.

There is the houseflag of the _Cutty Sark_, and her sister ships the
_Dharwar_, _Blackadder_, _Coldstream_--but one must be careful, and
refuse to allow these names to carry one-way. There are so many of
them. They are all good. Each can conjure up a picture and a memory.
They are like those names one reads in spring in a seed-merchant's
catalogue. They call to be written down, to be sung aloud, to be
shared with a friend. But I know the quick jealousy of some old
sailor, his pride wounded here by an unjustifiable omission of the ship
that was the one above all others for him, is bound to be moved by
anything less than a complete reprint here of the Register. How, for
example, could I give every name in the fleet of the White Star of
Aberdeen? Yet was not each ship, with her green hull and white spars,
as moving as a lyric? Is there in London River today a ship as
beautiful as the old _Thermopylae_? There is not. It is impossible.
There was the _Samuel Plimsoll_ of that line--now a coal hulk at
Gibraltar--which must be named, for she was Captain Simpson's ship (he
was commodore afterwards), the "merry blue-eyed skipper" of Froude's
_Oceana_, but much more than that, a sage and masterful Scot whose talk
was worth a long journey to hear.

The houseflag of Messrs. R. and H. Green, in any reference to the ships
of Blackwall, should have been mentioned first. There is a sense in
which it is right to say that the founder of that firm, at a time when
American craft like the Boston clippers of Donald McKay were in a fair
way to leave the Red Ensign far astern, declared that Blackwall had to
beat those American flyers, and did it. But that was long before the
eighties, and when steam was still ridiculed by those who could not see
it equalling clippers that had logged fourteen knots, or made a day's
run of over three hundred miles. Yet some of Green's ships came down
to the end of the era, like the _Highflyer_ and the _Melbourne_. The
latter was renamed the _Macquarie_, and was one of the last of the
clippers to come home to Poplar, and for that reason, and because of
her noble proportions, her picture is kept, as a reminder, by many who
wish to think of ships and the sea as they were. It is likely that
most who live in Poplar now, and see next to its railway stati