cargo is hauled piece-meal to vanish instantly into mid-air
caverns; London absorbs all they have as morsels. Anyhow, it is the
business of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below,
with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of
steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing,
though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a
winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory of
a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the
wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by
the frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some moods,
they are merely remembered. Only the men busy on the deck of the ship
below are real. Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out
noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you
feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow, and that all you people on
it are being drawn unresisting into that lower world of shades. You
release yourself from this spell with an effort, and look at the faces
of those who are beside you at the parapet. What are their thoughts?
Do they know? Have they also seen the ghosts? Have they felt stirring
a secret and forgotten desire, old memories, tales that were told?
They move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in the suburbs.
A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the Tower Bridge
gates to be opened for her. She is going. We watch the eastern mists
take her from us. For we never are so passive and well-disciplined to
the things which compel us but rebellion comes at times--misgiving that
there is a world beyond the one we know, regret that we never ventured
and made no discovery, and that our time has been saved and not spent.
The gates to the outer world close again.

There, where that ship vanished, is the highway which brought those
unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere. It is
our oldest road, and now has many bypaths. Near Poverty Corner is a
building which recently was dismissed with a brief, humorous reference
in a new guide to our City--a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a
brick front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond
its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is
the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would
guess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wi