tale of years of the river's strenuous service to its people these

are its only breathing times.
XXXIII.

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses,
has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the

sadness of a free spirit put under restraint. Chain cables and
stout ropes keep her bound to stone posts at the edge of a paved

shore, and a berthing-master, with brass buttons on his coat, walks
about like a weather-beaten and ruddy gaoler, casting jealous,

watchful glances upon the moorings that fetter a ship lying passive
and still and safe, as if lost in deep regrets of her days of

liberty and danger on the sea.
The swarm of renegades - dock-masters, berthing-masters, gatemen,

and such like - appear to nurse an immensedistrust of the captive
ship's resignation. There never seem chains and ropes enough to

satisfy their minds concerned with the safe binding of free ships
to the strong, muddy, enslaved earth. "You had better put another

bight of a hawser astern, Mr. Mate," is the usual phrase in their
mouth. I brand them for renegades, because most of them have been

sailors in their time. As if the infirmities of old age - the gray
hair, the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and the knotted

veins of the hands - were the symptoms of moral poison, they prowl
about the quays with an underhand air of gloating over the broken

spirit of noble captives. They want more fenders, more breasting-
ropes; they want more springs, more shackles, more fetters; they

want to make ships with volatile souls as motionless as square
blocks of stone. They stand on the mud of pavements, these

degraded sea-dogs, with long lines of railway-trucks clanking their
couplings behind their backs, and run malevolent glances over your

ship from headgear to taffrail, only wishing to tyrannize over the
poor creature under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence and care.

Here and there cargo cranes looking like instruments of torture for
ships swing cruel hooks at the end of long chains. Gangs of dock-

labourers swarm with muddy feet over the gangways. It is a moving
sight this, of so many men of the earth, earthy, who never cared

anything for a ship, trampling unconcerned, brutal and hob-nailed
upon her helpless body.

Fortunately, nothing can deface the beauty of a ship. That sense
of a dungeon, that sense of a horrible and degrading misfortune

overtaking a creature fair to see and safe to trust, attaches only
to ships moored in the docks of great European ports. You feel

that they are dishonestly locked up, to be hunted about from wharf
to wharf on a dark, greasy, square pool of black water as a brutal

reward at the end of a faithful voyage.
A ship anchored in an open roadstead, with cargo-lighters alongside

and her own tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is
accomplishing in freedom a function of her life. There is no

restraint; there is space: clear water around her, and a clear sky
above her mastheads, with a landscape of green hills and charming

bays opening around her anchorage. She is not abandoned by her own
men to the tender mercies of shore people. She still shelters, and

is looked after by, her own little devoted band, and you feel that
presently she will glide between the headlands and disappear. It

is only at home, in dock, that she lies abandoned, shut off from
freedom by all the artifices of men that think of quick despatch

and profitable freights. It is only then that the odious,
rectangular shadows of walls and roofs fall upon her decks, with

showers of soot.
To a man who has never seen the extraordinarynobility, strength,

and grace that the devoted generations of ship-builders have
evolved from some pure nooks of their simple souls, the sight that

could be seen five-and-twenty years ago of a large fleet of
clippers moored along the north side of the New South Dock was an

inspiring spectacle. Then there was a quarter of a mile of them,
from the iron dockyard-gates guarded by policemen, in a long,

forest-like perspective of masts, moored two and two to many stout
wooden jetties. Their spars dwarfed with their loftiness the

corrugated-iron sheds, their jibbooms extended far over the shore,
their white-and-gold figure-heads, almost dazzling in their purity,

overhung the straight, long quay above the mud and dirt of the
wharfside, with the busy figures of groups and single men moving to

and fro, restless and grimy under their soaring immobility.
At tide-time you would see one of the loaded ships with battened-

down hatches drop out of the ranks and float in the clear space of
the dock, held by lines dark and slender, like the first threads of

a spider's web, extending from her bows and her quarters to the
mooring-posts on shore. There, graceful and still, like a bird

ready to spread its wings, she waited till, at the opening of the
gates, a tug or two would hurry in noisily, hovering round her with

an air of fuss and solicitude, and take her out into the river,
tending, shepherding her through open bridges, through dam-like

gates between the flat pier-heads, with a bit of green lawn
surrounded by gravel and a white signal-mast with yard and gaff,

flying a couple of dingy blue, red, or white flags.
This New South Dock (it was its official name), round which my

earlier professional memories are centred, belongs to the group of
West India Docks, together with two smaller and much older basins

called Import and Export respectively, both with the greatness of
their trade departed from them already. Picturesque and clean as

docks go, these twin basins spread side by side the dark lustre of
their glassy water, sparely peopled by a few ships laid up on buoys

or tucked far away from each other at the end of sheds in the
corners of empty quays, where they seemed to slumber quietly

remote, untouched by the bustle of men's affairs - in retreat
rather than in captivity. They were quaint and sympathetic, those

two homely basins, unfurnished and silent, with no aggressive
display of cranes, no apparatus of hurry and work on their narrow

shores. No railway-lines cumbered them. The knots of labourers
trooping in clumsily round the corners of cargo-sheds to eat their

food in peace out of red cotton handkerchiefs had the air of
picnicking by the side of a lonely mountain pool. They were

restful (and I should say very unprofitable), those basins, where
the chief officer of one of the ships involved in the harassing,

strenuous, noisy activity of the New South Dock only a few yards
away could escape in the dinner-hour to stroll, unhampered by men

and affairs, meditating (if he chose) on the vanity of all things
human. At one time they must have been full of good old slow West

Indiamen of the square-stern type, that took their captivity, one
imagines, as stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of the waves

with their blunt, honest bows, and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses,
coffee, or logwood sedately with their own winch and tackle. But

when I knew them, of exports there was never a sign that one could
detect; and all the imports I have ever seen were some rare cargoes

of tropicaltimber, enormous baulks roughed out of iron trunks
grown in the woods about the Gulf of Mexico. They lay piled up in

stacks of mighty boles, and it was hard to believe that all this
mass of dead and stripped trees had come out of the flanks of a

slender, innocent-looking little barque with, as likely as not, a
homely woman's name - Ellen this or Annie that - upon her fine

bows. But this is generally the case with a discharged cargo.
Once spread at large over the quay, it looks the most impossible

bulk to have all come there out of that ship along-side.
They were quiet, serene nooks in the busy world of docks, these

basins where it has never been my good luck to get a berth after
some more or less arduous passage. But one could see at a glance

that men and ships were never hustled there. They were so quiet
that, remembering them well, one comes to doubt that they ever

existed - places of repose for tired ships to dream in, places of
meditation rather than work, where wicked ships - the cranky, the

lazy, the wet, the bad sea boats, the wild steerers, the
capricious, the pig-headed, the generally ungovernable - would have

full leisure to take count and repent of their sins, sorrowful and
naked, with their rent garments of sailcloth stripped off them, and