ps for any penniless youngster, with that pungent odour of sugar
crushed under foot, with its libations of syrup poured from the plenty
of the sunny isles. Today the quays are bare and deserted, and grass
rims the stones of the footway, as verdure does the neglected stone
covers in a churchyard. In the dusk of a winter evening the high and
silent warehouses which enclose the mirrors of water enclose too an
accentuation of the dusk. The water might be evaporating in shadows.
The hulls of the few ships, moored beside the walls, become absorbed in
the dark. Night withdraws their substance. What the solitary wayfarer
sees then is the incorporeal presentment of ships. Dockland expires.
The living and sounding day is elsewhere, lighting the new things on
which the young are working. Here is the past, deep in the obscurity
from which time has taken the sun, where only memory can go, and sees
but the ineffaceable impression of what once was there.

There is a notable building in our Dock Road, the Board of Trade
offices, retired a little way from the traffic behind a screen of plane
trees. Not much more than its parapet appears behind the foliage. By
those offices, on fine evenings, I find one of our ancients, Captain
Tom Bowline. Why he favours the road there I do not know. It would be
a reasonable reason, but occult. The electric trams and motor buses
annoy him. And not one of the young stokers and deck-hands just ashore
and paid off, or else waiting at a likely corner for news of a ship,
could possibly know the skipper and his honourable records. They do
not know that once, in that office, Tom was a famous and respected
figure. There he stands at times, outside the place which knew him
well, but has forgotten him, wearing his immemorial reefer jacket, his
notorious tall white hat and his humorous trousers--short, round,
substantial columns--with a broad line of braid down each leg.

His face is weather-stained still, and though his hair is white, it has
the form of its early black and abundant vitality. As long ago as 1885
he landed from his last ship, and has been with us since, watching the
landmarks go. "The sea," he said to me once, "the sea has gone. When
I look down this road and see it so empty--(the simple truth is it was
noisy with traffic)--I feel I've overstayed my time allowance. My
ships are firewood and wreckage, my owners are only funny portraits in
offices that run ten-thousand-ton steamers