be heard ticking in the next room; time, you could hear, going
leisurely. There would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless atoms
swimming in it, slanting from a corner of the window to brighten a
patch of carpet. Two flies would be hovering under the ceiling.
Sometimes they would dart at a tangent to hover in another place. I
used to wonder what they lived on. You felt secure there, knowing it
was old, but seeing things did not alter, as though the world were
established and content, desiring no new thing. I did not know that
the old house, even then, quiet and still as it seemed, was actually
rocking on the flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, sick with
anxiety and bewilderment in guiding his home in the years he did not
understand, which his experience had never charted, was sinking
nerveless at his helm. For he heard, when his children did not, the
premonition of breakers in seas having no landmark that he knew; felt
the trend and push of new and inimical forces, and currents that
carried him helpless, whither he would not go, but must, heartbroken,
into the uproar and welter of the modern.

I have been told that London east of the Tower has no history worth
mentioning, and it is true that sixteenth-century prints show the town
to finish just where the Dock of St. Katherine is now. Beyond that,
and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to
mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very
extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable
distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides
was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now
begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian
seaboard. Once it serpentined as far as the upper Pool, disappearing
as the wharves and docks were built to accommodate London's increasing
commerce. There is no doubt, then, that the Lower Thames parishes are
really young; but, when we are reminded that they have no history worth
mentioning, it may be understood that the historian is simply not
interested enough to mention it.

So far as age goes my shipping parish cannot compare with a cathedral
city; but antiquity is not the same as richness of experience. One
remembers the historic and venerable tortoise. He is old enough,
compared with us. But he has had nothing so varied and lively as the
least of us can show. Most of his reputed three hundred ye