own fashion, that the popular view hinted at its
imminent dissolution. A dignified, scarcely prosperous quiet seemed
the normal air of Blackpool Dock, so that even when it was busiest
--and work still came in, almost by tradition, with a certain
steadiness--when the hammers of the riveters and the shipwrights
awoke the echoes from sunrise to sunset, with a ferocious regularity
which the present proprietor could almost deplore, there was still a
suggestion of mildewed antiquity about it all that was, at least to
the nostrils of the outsider, not unpleasing. And when the ships
were painted, and had departed, it resumed very easily its more
regular aspect of picturesque dilapidation. For in spite of its
sordid surroundings and its occasional lapses into bustle, Blackpool
Dock, as Rainham would sometimes remind himself, when its commercial
motive was pressed upon him too forcibly, was deeply permeated by
the spirit of the picturesque.

Certainly Mr. Richard Lightmark, a young artist, in whose work some
excellent judges were beginning already to discern, if not the hand
of the master, at least a touch remarkably happy, was inclined to
plume himself on having discovered, in his search after originality,
the artistic points of a dockyard.

It was on his first visit to Rainham, whom he had met abroad some
years before, and with whom he had contracted an alliance that
promised to be permanent, that Lightmark had decided his study
should certainly be the river. Rainham had a set of rooms in the
house of his foreman, an eighteenth-century house, full of carved
oak mantels and curious alcoves, a ramshackle structure within the
dock-gates, with a quaint balcony staircase, like the approach to a
Swiss chalet, leading down into the yard. In London these apartments
were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived
nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct too
flagrantly eccentric--on a parity with his explanation of it,
alleging necessity of living on the spot: an explanation somewhat
droll, in the face of his constant lengthy absence, during the whole
of the winter, when he handed the reins of government to his
manager, and took care of a diseased lung in a warmer climate. To
Lightmark, however, dining with his friend for the first time on
chops burnt barbarously and an inferior pudding, residence even in a
less salubrious quarter than Blackpool would have been amply
justified, in view of the m