n the palpable and oppressive dusk to be
significant. Then a boatswain's pipe rends the heavy dark like the
gleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from the
steamer's bridge. There is a sudden commotion, we hear the voice
again, and answering cries, and by us, towards the black chasm of the
River in which hover groups of moving planets, the mass of the steamer
glides, its pale funnel mounting over us like a column. Out she goes,
turning broadside on, a shadow sprinkled with stars, then makes slow
way down stream, a travelling constellation occulting one after another
all the fixed lights.

Captain Tom knocks out his pipe on the heel of his boot, his eyes still
on the lights of the steamer. "Well," says Tom, "they can still do it.
They don't want any help old Tom could give aboard her. A good man
there. Where's she bound for, I wonder?"

Now who could tell him that? What a question to ask me. Did Tom ever
know his real destination? Not he! And have I not watched Dockland
itself in movement under the sun, easily mobile, from my window in its
midst? Whither was it bound? Why should the old master mariner expect
the young to answer that? He is a lucky navigator who always finds his
sky quite clear, and can set his course by the signs of unclouded
heavenly bodies, and so is sure of the port to which his steering will
take him.

IV. The Heart's Desire.

If the evening was one of those which seem longer than usual but still
have far to go, it was once a custom in Millwall to find a pair of
boots of which it could be claimed that it was time they were mended,
and to carry the artful parcel around to Mr. Pascoe. His cobbler's
shop was in a street that had the look of having retired from the hurry
and press of London, aged, dispirited, and indifferent even to its
defeat, and of waiting vacantly for what must come to elderly and
shabby despondence. Each grey house in the street was distinguished
but by its number and the ornament which showed between the muslin
curtains of its parlour window. The home of the Jones's had a
geranium, and so was different from one neighbour with a ship's model
in gypsum, and from the other whose sign was a faded photograph askew
in its frame. On warm evenings some of the women would be sitting on
their doorsteps, watching with dull faces their children at play, as if
experience had told them more than they wanted to know, but that they
had nothing to say