sics like Stevens on _Stowage_,
and Norie's _Navigation_, volumes never seen west of Gracechurch
Street. The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and were sorted by
chance. _Knots and Splices_, _Typee_, _Know Your Own Ship_, the _South
Pacific Directory_, and _Castaway on the Auckland Islands_. There were
many of them, and they were in that fortuitous and attractive order.
The back of every volume had to be read, though the light was bad. On
one wall between the windows a specimen chart was framed. Maps are
good; but how much better are charts, especially when you cannot read
them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering! About the coast
line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lines
which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart is blank,
being beyond soundings. At the capes are red dots, with arcs on the
seaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real lights
at night. Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and mates'
receipts in their pockets, being on errands to shipowners, look
outward, and only seem to look inward. Where are the confines of
London?

Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or used to be, an archway into a
courtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with half-models
of sailing ships. I remember the name of one, the _Winefred_.
Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on each. There
was a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand, desks made secret
with high screens, and a silence that might have been the reproof to
intruders of a repute remembered in dignity behind the screens by those
who kept waiting so unimportant a visitor as a boy. On the counter was
a stand displaying sailing cards, announcing, among other events in
London River, "the fine ship _Blackadder_ for immediate dispatch,
having most of her cargo engaged, to Brisbane." And in those days,
just round the corner in Billiter Street, one of the East India
Company's warehouses survived, a sombre relic among the new limestone
and red granite offices, a massive archway in its centre leading, it
could be believed, to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth
century, and forgotten. I never saw anybody go into it, or come out.
How could they? It was of another time and place. The familiar Tower,
the Guildhall that we knew nearly as well, the Cathedral which
certainly existed, for it could often be seen in the distance, and the
Abbey that was