r, even if there's a
strike. Parsons and old maids and Cardiff sharks, I reckon."

Very likely. But what sharks once were in it have all disappeared from
my Register. It belongs to those days when, if you went to New
Zealand, you had to go by sailer; when the East India Dock had an
arcade of jib-booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a varnished shark's
tail terminal--the _Euterpe_, _Jessie Readman_, _Wanganui_, _Wazmea_,
_Waimate_, _Opawa_, _Margaret Galbraith_, _Helen Denny_, _Lutterworth_,
and _Hermione_. There were others. What is in these names? But how
can we tell? There were personal figureheads, there were shapely
forms, each with its own narrative of adventure, there was the
undiscovered sea, and there was youth; and these have gone.

It is all very well to say that the names and mere words in this old
Register have no more meaning today than a railway time-table of the
same date. Hardly to be distinguished in the shadows in some corners
of St. Paul's Cathedral from which night never quite goes, there are
certain friendless regimental colours. Few of us know now who bore
them, and where, and why; but imagine the deserved fate of one who
would allow a brutal word to disturb their dust! They mean nothing,
except that men, in a world where it is easy to lose faith, treasure
the few tokens of faithfulness, courage, and enterprise proved in their
fellows; and so those old staffs, to which cling faded and dusty rags,
in a real sense support the Cathedral. Poplar once was a parish whose
name was more familiar in Eastern seas and on the coasts of the
Americans, and stood for something greater and of more value, than the
names of some veritable capital cities. That vista down the East India
Dock Road from North Street, past the plane trees which support on a
cloud the cupola of Green's Chapel, to the gateway of the dock which
was built for John Company, was what many would remember as essential
London who would pass the Mansion House as though it were a dingy and
nameless tavern. At the back of that road today, and opposite a church
which was a chapel-of-ease to save the crews of the East Indiamen lying
off Blackwall the long walk to Stebonhythe Church, is the public
library; and within that building are stored, as are the regimental
colours in the Cathedral, the houseflags of those very ships my
Register helps me to remember--the tokens of fidelity and courage, of a
service that was native, and a skill in th