on the
curious statue of a man and a dog, wonder who on earth Richard Green,
Esq., used to be; though there are a few oldsters left still who
remember Blackwall when its shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers, and
caulkers were men of renown and substance, and who can recall, not only
Richard Green, but that dog of his, for it knew the road to the dock
probably better than most of those who use it today. Poplar was the
nursery of the Clyde. The flags which Poplar knew well would puzzle
London now--Devitt and Moore's, Money Wigram's, Duthie's, Willis's,
Carmichael's, Duncan Dunbar's, Scrutton's, and Elder's. But when
lately our merchant seamen surprised us with a mastery of their craft
and a fortitude which most of us had forgotten were ever ours, what
those flags represented, a regard for a tradition as ancient and as
rigorous as that of any royal port, was beneath it all.

But if it were asked what was this tradition, it would not be easy to
say. Its authority is voiceless, but it is understood. Then what is
it one knows of it? I remember, on a day just before the War, the
flood beginning to move the shipping of the Pool. Eastward the black
cliffs lowered till they sank under the white tower of Limehouse
Church; and the church, looking to the sunset, seemed baseless, shining
with a lunar radiance. Upriver, the small craft were uncertain, moving
like phantoms over a pit of bottomless fire. But downstream every ship
was as salient as though lighted with the rays of a great lantern. And
there in that light was a laden barque, outward bound, waiting at the
buoys. She headed downstream. Her row of white ports diminished along
the length of her green hull. The lines of her bulwarks, her sheer,
fell to her waist, then airily rose again, came up and round to merge
in one fine line at the jibboom. The lines sweeping down and airily
rising again were light as the swoop of a swallow. The symmetry of her
laden hull set in a plane of dancing sun-points, and her soaring amber
masts, cross-sparred, caught in a mesh of delicate cordage, and shining
till they almost vanished where they rose above the buildings and stood
against the sky, made her seem as noble and haughty as a burst of great
music. One of ours, that ship. Part of our parish.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON RIVER***

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