p was
as memorable as a Greek statue. It is a ship's sheer which gives
loveliness to her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, finely
poised, sure of herself, in profile. She was so slight a body, so tall
and slender, but standing alert and illustriously posed, there was
implied in her slenderness a rare strength and swiftness. And to her
beauty of line there went a richness of colour which made our dull
parish a notable place. She was of wood, painted white. Her masts
were of pine, veined with amber. Her white hull, with the drenchings
of the seas, had become shot with ultramarine shadows, as though
tinctured with the virtue of the ocean. The verdigris of her sheathing
was vivid as green light; and the languid dock water, the colour of
jade, glinting round her hull, was lambent with hues not its own. You
could believe there was a soft radiation from that ship's sides which
fired the water about her, but faded when far from her sides, a
delicate and faery light which soon expired.

Such are our distinguished visitors in Dockland, though now they come
to us with less frequency. If the skipper of the _Oberon_ could now
look down the Dock Road from the corner by North Street, what he would
look for first would be, not, I am sure, what compelled the electric
trams, but for the entrance of the East Dock and its familiar tangle of
spars. He would not find it. The old dock is there, but a lagoon
asleep, and but few vessels sleeping with it. The quays are vacant,
except for the discarded lumber of ships, sun-dried boats, rusted
cables and anchors, and a pile of broken davits. The older dock of the
West India Merchants is almost the same. Yet even I have seen the
bowsprits and jib-booms of the Australian packets diminish down the
quays of the East Dock as an arcade; and of that West Dock there is a
boy who well remembers its quays buried under the largess of the
tropics and the Spanish Main, where now, through the colonnades of its
warehouse supports, the vistas are empty. Once you had to squeeze
sideways through the stacked merchandise. There were huge hogsheads of
sugar and hillocks of coconuts. Molasses and honey escaped to spread a
viscid carpet which held your feet. The casual prodigality of it
expanded the mind. Certainly this earth must be a big and cheerful
place if it could spread its treasures thus wide and deep in a public
place under the sky. It corrected the impression got from the retail
sho