conveying the impression of poverty and uselessness. Sometimes

such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. A river whose estuary
resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through a most

fertile country. But all the estuaries of great rivers have their
fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. Water is

friendly to man. The ocean, a part of Nature furthest removed in
the unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit of

mankind, has ever been a friend to the enterprising nations of the
earth. And of all the elements this is the one to which men have

always been prone to trust themselves, as if its immensity held a
reward as vast as itself.

From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition
to adventurous hopes. That road open to enterprise and courage

invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts towards the
fulfilment of great expectations. The commander of the first Roman

galley must have looked with an intenseabsorption upon the estuary
of the Thames as he turned the beaked prow of his ship to the

westward under the brow of the North Foreland. The estuary of the
Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble features, no romantic

grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is wide open,
spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a strange

air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day. The
navigation of his craft must have engrossed all the Roman's

attention in the calm of a summer's day (he would choose his
weather), when the single row of long sweeps (the galley would be a

light one, not a trireme) could fall in easy cadence upon a sheet
of water like plate-glass, reflecting faithfully the classic form

of his vessel and the contour of the lonely shores close on his
left hand. I assume he followed the land and passed through what

is at present known as Margate Roads, groping his careful way along
the hidden sandbanks, whose every tail and spit has its beacon or

buoy nowadays. He must have been anxious, though no doubt he had
collected beforehand on the shores of the Gauls a store of

information from the talk of traders, adventurers, fishermen,
slave-dealers, pirates - all sorts of unofficial men connected with

the sea in a more or less reputable way. He would have heard of
channels and sandbanks, of natural features of the land useful for

sea-marks, of villages and tribes and modes of barter and
precautions to take: with the instructive tales about native

chiefs dyed more or less blue, whose character for greediness,
ferocity, or amiability must have been expounded to him with that

capacity for vivid language which seems joined naturally to the
shadiness of moral character and recklessness of disposition. With

that sort of spiced food provided for his anxious thought, watchful
for strange men, strange beasts, strange turns of the tide, he

would make the best of his way up, a military seaman with a short
sword on thigh and a bronzehelmet on his head, the pioneer post-

captain of an imperial fleet. Was the tribe inhabiting the Isle of
Thanet of a ferociousdisposition, I wonder, and ready to fall with

stone-studded clubs and wooden lances hardened in the fire, upon
the backs of unwary mariners?

Amongst the great commercialstreams of these islands, the Thames
is the only one, I think, open to romantic feeling, from the fact

that the sight of human labour and the sounds of human industry do
not come down its shores to the very sea, destroying the suggestion

of mysterious vastness caused by the configuration of the shore.
The broad inlet of the shallow North Sea passes gradually into the

contracted shape of the river; but for a long time the feeling of
the open water remains with the ship steering to the westward

through one of the lighted and buoyed passage-ways of the Thames,
such as Queen's Channel, Prince's Channel, Four-Fathom Channel; or

else coming down the Swin from the north. The rush of the yellow
flood-tide hurries her up as if into the unknown between the two

fading lines of the coast. There are no features to this land, no
conspicuous, far-famed landmarks for the eye; there is nothing so

far down to tell you of the greatest agglomeration of mankind on
earth dwelling no more than five and twenty miles away, where the

sun sets in a blaze of colour flaming on a gold background, and the
dark, low shores trend towards each other. And in the great

silence the deep, faint booming of the big guns being tested at
Shoeburyness hangs about the Nore - a historical spot in the

keeping of one of England's appointed guardians.
XXXI.

The Nore sand remains covered at low-water, and never seen by human
eye; but the Nore is a name to conjure with visions of historical

events, of battles, of fleets, of mutinies, of watch and ward kept
upon the great throbbing heart of the State. This ideal point of

the estuary, this centre of memories, is marked upon the steely
gray expanse of the waters by a lightship painted red that, from a

couple of miles off, looks like a cheap and bizarre little toy. I
remember how, on coming up the river for the first time, I was

surprised at the smallness of that vivid object - a tiny warm speck
of crimson lost in an immensity of gray tones. I was startled, as

if of necessity the principalbeacon in the water-way of the
greatest town on earth should have presented imposing proportions.

And, behold! the brown sprit-sail of a barge hid it entirely from
my view.

Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the lightship
marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral

(the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and
the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of

the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war
moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with

its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon
a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown

clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a
pond. On the imposingexpanse of the great estuary the traffic of

the port where so much of the world's work and the world's thinking
is being done becomes insignificant, scattered, streaming away in

thin lines of ships stringing themselves out into the eastern
quarter through the various navigablechannels of which the Nore

lightship marks the divergence. The coasting traffic inclines to
the north; the deep-water ships steer east with a southern

inclination, on through the Downs, to the most remote ends of the
world. In the widening of the shores sinking low in the gray,

smoky distances the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile
fleet of good ships that London sends out upon the turn of every

tide. They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore.
Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for

the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the open:
while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and in

bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river
between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the

Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with
the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat,

like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames
is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem

very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is
Southend, or here and there a lonelywooden jetty where petroleum

ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks,
low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the

fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated
in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level

marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land
rises, closing the view with a continuouswooded slope, forming in

the distance an interminablerampart overgrown with bushes.
Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of

factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above
the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking

quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset,
they give an industrialcharacter to the scene, speak of work,

manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of
distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of

tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with
an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from

the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore
ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the

various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen
distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the

serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men's houses.