CHAPTER XI.

LONDON BRIDGE TO GRAVESEND.

Hogarth's Water Frolic--Billingsgate--Salesmen's Cries--The Custom House--Queen Elizabeth and the Customs--The Tower, and Tower Hill--The Pool--The Docks--Ratcliff Highway--The Thames Tunnel--In Rotherhithe--The Isle of Dogs--The Dock Labourer--Deptford and Greenwich--Woolwich Reach and Dockyard--The _Warspite_.

There is a mighty change in the river after it has passed Fishmonger's Hall. When the tide is running out it races through the arches of London Bridge, and swirls round the buttresses, and eddies to right and to left in such manner that the Thames waterman, having remembrance of many disasters brought about by absence of knowledge or want of care, amazes his passenger by his singular method of progression, rowing round a clump of barges, getting under the hull of a steamer, shooting across the river with the current, creeping slowly along by the wharves, and otherwise man[oe]uvring as if he were a general preparing to take a town. It requires a long pull and a strong pull to shoot the bridge against the tide, and often has it happened to the idler, leaning over the buttresses, to behold an upturned boat floating below him, and behind it the boatman and his passenger sustaining themselves above water by clinging to the oars.

The Thames waterman of the present year of grace is by no means such a picturesque person as the oarsman of former days. There is no salt water flavour about him; he wears no indication of his calling; he is, to all appearances, merely a landsman in a boat. It was otherwise in jolly William Hogarth's time. That great humorist drew, as the tailpiece to an eccentric book, a queer little design of a grinning Thames waterman, stout and jolly, seated on crossed oars, his legs drawn up to his chin, a drinking-glass and an earthen pipkin dangling from his gigantic heels. He was a creature all hat, boots, and broad grin; whereas the waterman of to-day is rather a solemn sort of person, very indifferently clad, who takes your shilling or your half-crown as if you were doing him an injury.

The tailpiece aforesaid adorns the last page of an entertaining account of how Hogarth, and three friends of his, set off on a holiday excursion to Gravesend, Rochester, and Sheerness, sailing over just that space of water which we are about to explore. The four boon companions set off from the Bedford Coffee House, in Covent Garden, on the 27th of May, 1732. They spent a day in the neighbourhood of Billingsgate, drinking, apparently, and Hogarth drew a caricature of a long-shore humorist who was known as "the Duke of Puddledock," which said caricature, the rhyming chronicler of the expedition records, in execrable verse, "was pasted on the cellar door." Thackeray calls these four, "a jolly party of tradesmen at high jinks," and high jinks they certainly had, Hogarth and one of his companions playing at hopscotch in Rochester Town Hall. They went down the river in a "tilt boat," laughing and shouting and drinking, exchanging jokes with the watermen, singing each other to sleep with jolly choruses, and behaving generally in a manner that was highly indecorous and reprehensible. It was six o'clock in the morning when they reached Gravesend, something like twenty-four hours after their start. With the tide in your favour, on the steamers which leave London Bridge twice a day, you may now make the same bright and agreeable journey in two hours and a half.

And such a journey should every one make who wishes to realise, however faintly, the picturesque magnificence, the prodigious commerce, the splendid importance of the Thames. The crowded shipping of the Pool, the steamers coming and going, the vessels lying at anchor here and there, as if the river were a huge dock, only feebly represent the vast tonnage which is borne on our grand and historic river every day of every year. Behind the great piles of warehouses--towering over the housetops, ornamenting the sky with a curious fretwork of masts and spars and cordage--lie scores and hundreds of the vessels of all nations, crowded into dock beyond dock, making a line of rigging, of glittering yards and masts, of furled sails and flaunting canvas, on either side of the Thames for mile on mile.

It is on the Tower side that the line is least broken. London Bridge is scarcely left behind ere St. Katharine's and London Docks come in sight; then follow the enormous acreage of the East and West India Docks, then come the docks at Millwall, and the Albert and Victoria Docks, stretching onward to North Woolwich--a vast contiguity of dock property, basin beyond basin occupied by some of the finest shipping that roams the seas.

Earlier in the century, when the screw-steamer was as yet undreamed of, and there had been no vision of the steam-tug which is so vast a convenience to-day, this portion of the river presented at certain seasons a much more stirring sight than now. Fleets of vessels, with their sails spread, came in at every tide; hundreds of ships lay crowding in the Thames at the mercy of the wind; it was a long panorama of seafaring life, with no bellying smoke to impede the view. All that has been changed by the wand of Science and the genius of Discovery. If a vessel lies in the stream instead of in the docks, it is for purposes peculiarly its own; and the dock gates, instead of opening to whole fleets driven up by a prosperous wind, swing open to solitary, but more gigantic, vessels propelled by steam.

Not that sailing-ships are no longer numerous in the Thames! The old East Indiaman has departed, the ships of John Company are broken to pieces; but the tall three-master is by no means an unfamiliar object, and on the Thames waters below London Bridge one may encounter schooners and brigs and brigantines galore. Nor has the number of lighters and wherries and dumb-barges diminished. On most shipping rivers these auxiliaries of trade have almost or wholly disappeared. The uncouth keelmen of the Tyne are a race with few survivors, and when the universally popular "Keel Row" is sung or played, it is almost invariably without reference to its former signification. On the Mersey no long line of coal-barges blocks the stream. The barge and the keel have, indeed, had their day, and are now little more than encumbrances; yet it is probable that they will be familiar objects for years to come on the Thames. When the docks were made, the watermen rose up in revolt against a threatened invasion of their privileges, and were fortunate enough to secure for themselves new rights which ensured their continuance and prosperity. So it happens that in addition to the sailing-ships and schooners which may be seen at anchor along either side of the Thames, there is a great number of smaller craft, inconvenient but full of interest, greatly in the way, but very delightful to the artist and the heedful possessor of a "quiet eye."

No effective justice has ever yet been done to the lower portion of the Thames. You will find it stated in most books on the subject that the river ceases to be picturesque when it has passed St. Paul's. A French poet calls it "an infected sea, rolling its black waters in sinuous detours"; and that is the despondent view that has been taken by the majority of English writers. Yet in the eyes of those who have roamed about this section of the river, and have loved it, only at London Bridge does the Thames become really interesting. In the higher reaches it is an idyllic river, swooning along through pleasant landscapes; after St. Paul's it takes on a new and more sombre sort of glory, assumes a mightier interest, and is infinitely more majestic in the lifting of its waters. Above London Bridge, even when the wind is blowing, the waves are small and broken, like those of a mountain lake; in the Pool the water surges and heaves in broad masses, the light seems to deal with it more nobly, and the Thames assumes such majesty as becomes a stream which flows through the grandest city, and bears so great a portion of the commerce, of the world.

As for picturesqueness, one may behold a score of the finest possible pictures from London Bridge itself. The grey tower of St. Magnus' Church, smitten by a passing ray of sunlight, stands out bright and shining behind the dark mass of buildings over Freshwater Wharf; beyond it, more dimly seen, the Monument lifts its flaming crown; the Pool is alive with hurrying steamers and clustering sails; Billingsgate is in the midst of its traffic; the white face of the Custom House looks down into the dun waters; and yonder rise the more sombre walls of our most ancient fortress, the venerable quadragon of the White Tower, with its four dark cupolas, dominating them all.

Round the spot on which Freshwater Wharf now stands clustered Roman London. There are still some half-hidden relics of it under the recent and handsome Coal Exchange in Thames Street. There, descending to the foundations, one may find a hypocaust full of fair spring water, a pavement floor, an ancient and austere seat built of Roman tiles, and some pieces of ruined wall. It is the lower portion of a Roman house, the most interesting and complete bit of evidence still remaining in London of the Roman occupation of Britain.

The front of Billingsgate has altered its aspect of late. A wharf has arisen where, heretofore, a couple of narrow gangways descended sheer to the foreshore of the Thames, when it was exposed, and to the water, when the tide was in. Many a Billingsgate porter has lost his life hurrying up those gangways, yet, so conservative is the City of London in its habits, that it is only a few years since the conclusion was reached that the market would be no worse, and human life would be all the safer, for a pier. With that very modern improvement one of our London "sights" has changed its aspect. No longer may we behold the four lines of white-jacketed figures, two bustling up from and two hurrying down to the boats. Yet the white-jacketed figures are there, and they bustle about as of old, though the work has become indescribably easier, and is carried on by men in less constant peril of their lives.

To see Billingsgate in the full tide of its work--and England has no other sight to compare with it--one must rise with the sun in summer, and long before the dawn in winter, when heavily-laden market-carts from Kent are rumbling over London Bridge, whilst the homeless tramp is still composing himself to slumber, and while still the mists cling to the surface of the river so heavily as to seem beyond the power of any mere London sunshine to raise or dispel.

At five in the morning, summer or winter, rain or shine, Billingsgate seems to shake itself and start on a sudden into active and turbulent life. In the night a series of long, low, snake-like steamers have crept up the river, bearing freight from the fishing-smacks which are pursuing their dangerous fortune in the North Sea. Just below where they have dropped anchor cluster several broad-beamed, highly-polished, Dutch schuyts, bringing oysters or eels to market, and reminding you, by their bulk and build, of the stout, prosperous, slow-moving citizens of Amsterdam. Little panting steam-tugs are hurrying here and there, and amid a confused glare of lights, and a tempest of smoke and steam, the Billingsgate porters, having waited for the five o'clock bell, rush out in streams to schuyt and smack and steamer, pushing, shouting, swearing, surging to and fro in the mist and steam and glare, working with the energy of gnomes doomed to perform an allotted task ere the first beams of morning surprise them at their toil.

Thames Street, and Fish Street Hill, and Pudding Lane, and many a street and alley roundabout, are crowded, packed, jammed, with vans and carts and trollies. The stranger wanders bewildered and afraid among all these, in danger of being knocked down by laden porters, run over by market-carts, hustled out of all self-possession by feverish buyers, or lost amongst such a wild and interminable confusion of vehicles as no other place in the world can show.

For all that is known to the contrary, Billingsgate has been a fish-market from the time when the ancient British inhabitants of the proud hill on which the City of London stands put off in their coracles to seek the means of livelihood in the broad waters which dock and warehouse and wharf now confine in the comparatively narrow channel of the Thames. There was a toll on fishing at Billingsgate when the Saxon Æthelstan reigned. William III. made the market open and free for all sorts of fish in 1699. Since that day many attempts have been made to establish fish-markets elsewhere in London, but up to this time with uniform non-success. It is not yet quite a score of years since the present Billingsgate Market was completed. You may still read, in even recent books, of "the elegant Italian structure" of Mr. Bunning, with its towering campanile, its fine arcades, and its picturesque blending of brick and stone. Mr. Bunning's market, however, was too small for its purposes; and in 1874 the present building was begun, and, in spite of vast difficulties, was finished without disturbance of the business of the day. It preserves much of the old "elegance" of structure, and is partly Italian in style, but the smoke of the steamers clings to it, and has blackened it so that, between the grey buildings above Freshwater Wharf and the shining walls of the Custom House, it looks like a patch of shadow in a field of light.

Fish was once indifferently delivered at Billingsgate or at Queenhithe, on the other side of London Bridge. Henry III., at a loss how to furnish pin-money for his wife, gave to her a tax on the fish landed at Queenhithe Pier. It was a tax, too, which the fishmongers were very reluctant to pay, and many were the fines inflicted on shipmasters who tarried at Billingsgate instead of making their way to the royal quay. Billingsgate fought that hard battle against royalty with great resolution, and ultimately won. Since then it has become obstructive on its own account, and has, in turn, successfully resisted any invasion of its own exceptional privileges. The dealers at Billingsgate must in those early days have been as rich, and quite as exclusive and privileged, as are their successors of this latter part of the nineteenth century, for it is recorded how, when the news was brought to London of the victory which Edward I. had obtained over the Scots, they paraded the city with over a thousand horsemen, accompanied by the sound of trumpets, and the streaming of banners, and all the fine pageantry of a picturesque time.

The daily supply of fish to Billingsgate amounts, on an average, to 500 tons. It is difficult to realise how prodigious a quantity is this; but the imagination is assisted by reflecting that one ton of fish is equal in weight to twenty-eight sheep, so that the day's supply of 500 tons is equivalent to a woolly herd of not less than 14,000. London in this manner draws to itself the great bulk of the fish that are caught around our coasts; but, it must be understood, Billingsgate does not exist for the advantage of metropolitan consumers alone. Most of the large provincial towns draw upon the great fish-market of the Thames, and almost as soon as the day's supply is landed and sold much of it is speeding off in fast trains to the great centres of industry, where it is again distributed, it may be, to less important communities, and to small hamlets nestling amid ancestral trees.

At Billingsgate you may make your purchases by the ton or the single fish. There are fish-salesmen of varying degrees, some selling, in large quantities, the fish as it is landed from the boats, others selling over again to shopkeepers and to costermongers what they have only themselves purchased some half-an-hour before. The more respected and prosperous dealers, coming early, with long purses, have the pick of the market, and are speeding off home again before the bell of St. Paul's has tolled the hour of nine. Then the costermongers come crowding in, shouting, pushing, swearing, exchanging jokes, impugning the freshness of the fish, boiling into anger at the prices asked from them, and filling the market-hall with an amazing clatter of Cockney tongues.

The attendance of the London coster is regulated by the supply of fish. Sometimes only a few scores of these itinerant dealers are to be encountered in Old Thames Street; sometimes they are present by hundreds and thousands. It has never yet been discovered how the intelligence of a profuse and cheap fish supply is diffused over London; but it invariably occurs that when the market is overstocked every costermonger in town has knowledge of the fact long before noon. It is much as if the street-dealers were connected with Billingsgate by electric wires. "Barrows" come racing by dozens over London Bridge; Covent Garden Market is suddenly deserted by the most numerous class of its customers; from Shadwell, from Kentish Town, from more remote Hammersmith, the costermonger rushes off to Billingsgate as if for bare life, and by mid-day cheap fish is being cried all through the London streets and far off at the doors of "Villadom" in the suburbs.

The late Henry Mayhew has striven to give an idea of the confused cries of Billingsgate in his wonderful and painstaking work on "London Labour and the London Poor," where the sounds heard above the general din are represented thus:--"Ha--a--ansome cod! best in the market! All alive! alive! alive, O!" "Yeo, ye--e--o! Here's your fine Yarmouth bloaters! Who's the buyer?" "Here you are, guv'ner; splendid whiting." "Turbot, turbot! All alive, turbot!" "Glass of nice peppermint this cold morning, a ha'penny a glass, a ha'penny a glass!" "Fine soles, oy, oy, oy!" "Hullo, hullo, here! beautiful lobsters, good and cheap!" "Hot soup, nice pea-soup! a--all hot, hot!" "Who'll buy brill, O, brill, O?" "Fine flounders, a shilling a lot! O ho! O ho! this way--this way--this way! Fish alive! alive! alive O!" And in such fashion is business carried on at Billingsgate every morning, amid a turbulence not to be described.

It is a prosaic, evil-smelling business, this of fish dealing, relieved by no such spectacles as were to be witnessed in the time of Stowe, when, "on St. Magnus' Day the fishmongers, with solemn procession, paraded through the streets, having, among other pageants and shows, four sturgeons, gilt, carried on four horses; and after, six-and-forty knights armed, riding on horses, made 'like luces of the sea;' and then St. Magnus, the patron saint of the day, with a thousand horsemen." The salesmen reserve their solemn rites in these days for the dinners in Fishmongers' Hall, and the only "Knights" they can boast of are those ludicrous "men in armour" who make a part of the Lord Mayor's Show.

Close by Billingsgate lies the long frontage of the Custom House, conspicuous no less by reason of its bulk and position than for that leprous whiteness which, on certain kinds of stone, is one of the effects of the biting and crumbling atmosphere of London. The site is one that should be dear to lovers of English poetry. Here Geoffrey Chaucer officiated as Controller of Customs, the stipulation being that he should write the rolls of his office with his own hand, and perform his duties personally, and not by deputy. It may be that whilst his pen was thus unpoetically employed, his mind wandered off to the "Tabard" Inn, by the end of London Bridge, to its jolly landlord, "bold of his speech, and wise and well-i-taught," and to the curiously compounded bands of pilgrims who gathered there on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Here, also, came William Cowper, in one of his fits of insanity, intent on suicide. The water was low, exposing the foreshore, and there was a careless porter sitting on a bale of goods. It seemed to the poor stricken poet as if the man were waiting there to prevent the execution of his purpose, "and so," he says, "this passage to the bottomless pit being mercifully closed against me, I returned to the coach," which was really the only sensible thing he could do.

The present Custom House, built in 1825, contains one of the longest and the most dingy-looking rooms in England. Here may be encountered strings of British merchants and rough ship-captains waiting to transact business relating to their cargoes. At one counter is kept a record of vessels and their owners, at another the clearance of ships outward is the subject of concern; at a third the skipper must hand in a list of every article on board his vessel, and thence proceed from counter to counter until he has satisfied all the requirements of the law. In one corner of the building there is a Custom House Museum, containing many quaint official documents, detailing how John Doe, being a Papist, did not receive his quarter's salary, and how some other servant of the Customs has been docked of his wages because of the indiscretion of somebody else's wife; containing, also, curious articles which have been employed in small acts of smuggling--a stewardess's crinoline that has been puffed out with a bottle of right good Hollands, a book which has been made to do duty as a brandy-flask, quantities of snuff that have been shipped as oilcake, and many other curious examples of unexpected failure to evade the law. Those whose business it is to detect cheats of this description love to retain some memorial of their prowess, and in this manner it happens that the Custom House Museum is valuable chiefly to those who care to study human ingenuity in connection with dishonest purposes.

There is in existence a curious record concerning the Custom House and Queen Bess. "About this time (1590)," writes the quaint author of "The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that famous Princesse Elizabeth," "the commodity of the Custom House amounted to an unexpected value; for the Queen, being made acquainted by the means of a subtle fellow, named Caermardine, with the mystery of their gaines, so enhanced the rate that Sir Thomas Smith, master of the Custom House, who heretofore farmed it of the Queen for £14,000 yearly, was now mounted to £42,000, and afterwards to £50,000, which, notwithstanding, was valued but as an ordinary sum for such oppressing gaine. The Lord Treasurer, the Earls of Leicester and Walsingham, much opposed themselves against this Caermardine ... but the Queen answered them that all princes ought to be, if not as favourable, yet as just, to the lowest as to the highest, desiring that they who falsely accused her Privy Council of sloth or indiscretion should be severely punished; but they who justly accused them should be heard. That she was Queen as well to the poorest as to the proudest, and that therefore she would never be deaf to their just complaints. Likewise that she would not suffer that these toll-takers, like horse-leeches, should glut themselves with the riches of the realm, and starve her Exchequer; which, as she will not bear it to be docked, so hateth she to enrich it with the poverty of her people." From which lion-like speech it appears that Queen Elizabeth more than suspected her Privy Councillors of having intercepted moneys which should have found their way to the Exchequer of the Crown.

After the Billingsgate fever is over, everything round about the Custom House seems quiet and sleepy and still; yet an almost inconceivable amount of business is transacted within its walls. Every merchant receiving a cargo, every shipmaster going out or coming in, has unavoidable business here. There is a series of counters, distinguished by the various letters of the alphabet, and from one to another the visitors to the Custom House continue to circulate, engaging in one sort of transaction at one counter, and in some other sort at a second, and third, and fourth. It is a long and wearisome process, the discharge of the various duties appertaining to the entry and the clearing out of ships--a process which, be it said, seems much less trying to the clerks than to those on whom they are called upon to attend.

In front of the Custom House there is a broad quay, used as a public promenade, a true haven of rest to him who has lost heart and energy in the almost vain attempt to escape from the crowd and the bustle of Thames Street. At this spot, on New Year's Morning, the Jews of London were wont to assemble to offer up prayers in remembrance of that sad captivity when their people sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept. The custom has been discouraged of late years, but there are still some professors of the ancient faith who follow the rule of their forefathers, and offer up the time-worn prayers on the spot which was consecrated by them in "the days that are no more."

It is difficult to break away from that portion of the river on which we seem already to have lingered too long. The Thames is here full of interest and of crowding associations. Over the water, behind the great, grim warehouses, slopes downward into Bermondsey that Tooley Street which the three tailors--"we, the people of England"--have made famous throughout the world. From amid grimy roofs and grey-brown walls rises the tower of St. Olave's Church, half-buried and lost amid a London of which its builders never dreamed. Down here, in narrow street and dim entry, the bewildered stranger begins to feel that, after all, man is too small for the planet on which he lives. Great walls--of granary, and store, and manufactory--reach over and above him, and dwarf him into extreme littleness. He seems to be walking beneath high cliffs by the sea. The whole air trembles and throbs with noise and travail. Here and there, through some unexpected narrow opening, may be discerned a thin strip of river, with ships and boats. At intervals of every two or three hundred yards these openings occur, and they lead down to old-fashioned Thames stairs, where the waterman plies his trade. Lingering about the landing-places, or the streets and alleys adjacent thereto, one meets occasional blear-eyed, evil-countenanced, ill-clad men, who approach with a sinuous stoop of the shoulders, a deferential ducking of the head, and a dirty thumb raised to the brim of a greasy hat. These men will do anything for money except work. If you employ one of them to conduct you to the stairs and to call a boat he will pretend to hurry forward, but, without progressing much, will look furtively behind, seem to measure your size and estimate your running powers, and then proceed slowly in front, his evil-looking thumb continually beckoning, and his croaking voice ejaculating, "This way, sir; this way; this way, if _you_ please." He means no mischief probably, but as you walk through these parts of London in such company you are thankful it is daylight, and that even the alleys and courts of the Surrey side are not absolutely impervious to the sun.

Some of these strange places have equally strange names. Pickle Herring Street, and Shad Street, and other cramped thoroughfares with ancient and fish-like designations, suggest that here, also, almost directly opposite to Billingsgate, there must have been a market once. There is scarcely even a shop or a public-house now. This is the London that really works with a will. To the right are tanneries and tallow-chandleries--their odour loads the atmosphere as if it were a thick fog, incapable of any effort to rise--to the left are vast granaries and wharves; and between them the narrow spaces are filled up with hurrying vehicles and toiling men.

From the south to the north side of the river there is a continual stream of labourers, some making their way under the river, like moles, by means of the subway, some streaming down to the boat-landings and casting off in batches into the tide. The subway is an iron barrel, some six feet in diameter, which has been driven underground far below the bed of the Thames. Walking through it, one hears, as a series of dull, only half-audible, thuds, the lashing of a paddle-steamer overhead. No other sound reaches that cramped, underground chamber, in which one seems to be walking as in a coal mine, from the dark into the dark. After this dreary journey, we ascend a flight of stairs that is wearying, and that seems to be endless, and emerge on Tower Hill, into the sunshine, and the presence of green trees, and the sight of what is most venerable in the whole English realm.

Tower Hill is a sort of oasis in a desert filled with the whirling sands of traffic--the terminus to the great lines of warehouses which fill Thames Street. Surrounded by shops and offices and public buildings, it is, but for the country cousin newly arrived to behold "the sights," almost as quiet as some retired corner of the parks. Standing here, where so many historic heads have fallen, one may behold the river streaming by, and watch the sun lighting up the polished masts of a hundred vessels slumbering in the Pool.

On Tower Hill stands Trinity House, which claims notice here because of its close connection with the river and with ships. Queen Elizabeth made the Masters of Trinity the guardians of our sea-marks, and they have now the sole management of our lighthouses and our buoys. Part of their business is to mark out the locality of wrecks, and to announce to the shipmasters of all nations any changes in the entrances to English ports. At Trinity House is one of those numerous London museums which are seldom seen--a museum of models of lifeboats, buoys, lighthouses, life-saving apparatus, and other objects connected with the safety of ships and voyagers at sea. Here the curious visitor may spend an hour or two with advantage, and it will be matter for wonder if he does not come away oddly instructed in many intricate matters connected with the sea.

To all fairly informed Englishmen, the history of the Tower of London is so familiar that it would be an impertinence to recount any portion of it here. The "towers of Julius, London's lasting shame"--not that Cæsar really had anything to do with them--have the peculiarity of being known, through some sort of representation, to most, even, of those stay-at-home people who are said to have country wits. And let it be said at once that at the first glance they are not nearly so imposing as they are usually made to appear. "And that is the Tower?" an American observed to me lately; "and that is the Tower? Well, then, I guess the Tower was not worth crossing the Atlantic to see." Yet, even this unfavourable critic saw reason to change his views. It is from the river, and not from Tower Hill, that the first inspection of this venerable edifice should be made. Seated on an idle barge, one may contemplate it at leisure; and it is only after leisurely contemplation that its fine grouping, its richly varied colour, and its compact massiveness force themselves on one's slow appreciation. From just behind where we are supposed to be seated, the adherents of the Earl of Salisbury poured stone shot into the Tower precincts when Henry VI. was king. Facing us, the lower portion now hidden by a quay wall, is the round arch of Traitors' Gate--

"Through which before Went Essex, Raleigh, Sidney, Cranmer, More."

with those steps still intact on which the Princess Elizabeth seated herself, petulantly declining to make such an entrance to the Tower as would declare her to be a traitor to the realm.

Up to quite recently, to the time of Mr. Shaw-Lefevre's occupancy of the office of Board of Works, indeed, the Tower, as seen from the river, was much disfigured by modern buildings of exceeding ugliness, which public feeling had long since condemned. Most of these have now disappeared, but one such building, bearing the appearance of a granary, still remains to break the face of the White Tower with its dull red-brown. Beyond it one catches glimpses of quaint gabled roofs, characteristic of periods as widely separated as those of Elizabeth and Queen Anne. To the left are more buildings of old red-brick, with ivy clustering over them, and beyond, home of many sad memorials, rise the walls of the Beauchamp Tower, with, beside them, a curious lumber of quaint, many-windowed, square turrets, jumbled together in different ages for diverse purposes, and now used as lodgings for the Beefeaters and the guard.

In the church of St. Peter ad Vincula, the situation of which one may guess from the river, were interred the headless bodies of Queen Catherine Howard, of Anne Boleyn, of the Countess of Shrewsbury, and of Lady Jane Grey; of Sir Thomas More, of the first Cromwell, of Seymour, Lord High Admiral, of his brother, the Protector Somerset, and of many others whose illustrious positions were the occasions of their own misfortunes. "There is no sadder spot on earth than this little cemetery," says Macaulay. "Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration, and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny; with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame." The most ancient and illustrious building that is mirrored in the waters of the Thames is, indeed, also the home of the grimmest memories. The Tower is a sad, depressing place to visit, the concrete representative of all the darker events of our history.

The character of the Thames below London Bridge is best expressed by the normal appearance of the Pool. And let me at once explain that the Pool is the wide, curving stretch of river which extends from just above the Tower to the neighbourhood of "Wapping Old Stairs." Here, in most abundance, you find "toil, glitter, grime, and wealth on a flowing tide." Mr. W. L. Wyllie's picture, purchased out of the funds of the Chantrey bequest, is a wonderfully characteristic description of the aspect which the Thames presents in this busy portion of its course. In the foreground a couple of coal-laden boats, with a little hasty steam-tug beside them, are making slow headway against the tide; beyond these, a great iron steamship rears up its vast bulk; a couple of heavily-laden Thames barges are flying along under full sail; on either side of the river there are confused masses of rigging, with here and there the hull of a ship, half visible through whirling clouds of smoke and steam. On the waterway, kept clear of all vessels at anchor for a breadth of 200 feet, the strong white sunlight gleams, making clear to the spectator what the poet Spenser had in his mind when, in his rich vocabulary, he spoke of "the silver-streaming Thames."

Spenser's phrase is one which has been greatly misunderstood. The Thames, even in its quietest and least corrupted days, can never have been a very pellucid stream. When Taylor, the water poet, plied his craft upon it he must have found almost as much difficulty in looking into its mysterious depths as we find to-day. Certainly, to the local colour of a swift-flowing river which brings down continuous deposits of mud from far-off meadow-lands, such a word as "silvery" could never properly be applied. Only when the sunlight struck the river, and its rippled surface tremblingly gleamed back to the sky with a reflection of its own brightness, could Spenser have been delighted by the aspect of the "silver-streaming" waters, ebbing and flowing through London's heart, and bearing onward their heavy burden to the sea. Leaning over the rail of a steamer outward bound, one is apt to forget everything else in the contemplation of these brilliant and rapidly changing effects of light, which seem to chase one another as if in mere wantonness, and which, in no mood of wantonness, at every capricious curve of the stream cast on the thick dusky waters some new and strange glory.

The Pool is full of such life and movement as is to be encountered on no other English river, for here the crowded ships do not merely lie at anchor, waiting on wind and tide; they are busy loading and unloading freights. One hears the grating of cranes and the shouts of men; the peculiar "dumb-barges" of the Thames cluster round the hulls of screw-colliers from Newcastle, and receive from them their separate loads of coal; and excitable little steamers are running in and out as if they had lost their way among the crowded shipping. In mid-stream the traffic is almost as busy and confusing as that of a London street. Vessels are coming up with the tide; barges are slowly floating onward, their brown sails spread, tacking to the wind, their decks washed now and again by some arrowy wave from a paddle-steamer. There is, as Mr. Jefferies says, "a hum, a haste, almost a whirl," for on the river work proceeds at a more rapid pace than in the docks, and the Thames, it must be remembered, is the busiest port on the surface of the globe.

It is hard to say whether the Pool is most beautiful and striking at moonlight or in the dawn. Turner loved it best at the hour before twilight, when the sky was robed in gold and crimson and purple, and the Thames was ablaze with the light of the setting sun. At such seasons it is indeed very glorious; yet to me it has always seemed most beautiful in the morning, when the light is slowly diffusing itself from behind a bank of purple cloud, and the face of the White Tower is touched into pale gold, and there is a glittering radiance on turret and roof, and the craft anchored in the stream are reflected to every mast and spar and half-furled sail, and the river trembles in the new radiance as if it were divided between delight and fear. Everything is very still and soft and shadowy. It is such a scene as seems appropriate to happy dreams. In another hour or two the river will be awake, the twitter of birds flitting across the waters will be drowned in the shouting of labourers and the shrieking of cranes; the stream, its brief glory departed, will be churned up by paddle-wheel and screw; the swarthy steam-colliers will come, hard and clear, out of the soft haze, and the Thames will become a workaday river again, wonderful still, but, after such a vision, too grimly prosaic and real. Yet it is well to have seen it once with the dawn upon it, if only to learn how those have libelled it who deny that it is "picturesque."

In the seventeenth century there was, in the Upper, Lower, and Middle Pools, space for 900 vessels. Nearly that number might now be packed into the London and St. Katharine's Docks, which lie just below the Tower, hemmed in by what was once fashionable London, now fashionable no more, but famous the world over as the accustomed haunt of the seaman on shore. Before docks were constructed along Thames-side, vessels were unloaded into barges and wherries, and river-robbery was a thriving trade. Numbers of men lived, and grew rich, on what they had contrived to steal from cargoes that were waiting to be discharged at the wharves about London Bridge. Ships were sometimes as much as six weeks in unloading, and a whole host of lightermen, carmen, porters, and nondescripts thrived on the unconscionable delay. There were good pickings in those times, and it is wonderful, when we consider with how much rascality and obstruction our commerce had to contend, that England ever became a great nation of carriers and traders.

The docks nearest to London Bridge cover the site of a church, a hospital, and a graveyard.

More than 700 years ago, or, to be precise, in 1148, Matilda, the wife of King Stephen, founded on a site just below the Tower a hospital which was dedicated to St. Katharine. It endured, in one form or another, to 1827, when the building was pulled down, and the hospital was removed to Regent's Park. In that same year was commenced the construction of the St. Katharine's Docks, which, by the employment of 2,500 workmen, were completed in the brief space of eighteen months. They cover an area of twenty-three acres, ten of water and thirteen of land. The docks are the most prosaic of all those which are to be found along Thames shore. To the river they present a dull heavy frontage, which suggests no connection with ships; on the land side they are shut off from observation by a prodigiously high wall. Entering through the gates you find three great basins, with ships lying close to the wharves, and you have towering above you gigantic warehouses, dull and dismal, but capable, you would suppose, of finding storage room for half the commerce of a city. The cellars of St. Katharine's Dock are complex and amazing, but the docks themselves are going out of vogue, for many of the ships which used to frequent them are now intercepted before the lights of London come in sight, the Victoria and Albert Docks, much lower down the river, absorbing a great proportion of the traffic which was wont to make its way into the Pool.

The London Docks, much larger than those of St. Katharine, are beginning to share in the same neglect. They are of more ancient date than their neighbours, having been designed by Rennie, the architect of London Bridge, in 1805. As many as three hundred vessels can find a comfortable haven here. The warehouses will contain 220,000 tons of goods; there is storage for 130,000 bales of wool; the wine-cellars are among the marvels and attractions of London. "Here," Mr. Sala has remarked, "in a vast succession of vaults, roofed with cobwebs many years old, are stored in pipes and hogsheads the wines that thirsty London--thirsty England, Ireland, and Scotland--must needs drink." Curious persons come here with tasting orders, and are shown round by brawny coopers, who seem marvellously wasteful of good wine, and are more generous to their visitors than the most prosperous of City merchants, with the best plenished of wine-cellars, is to his friends. Many a visitor to the wine-cellars of the London Docks has found occasion to regret, when he has reached the open air, that he has been so easily tempted to pass too frequent opinions on too many varieties of wine. In the cellars an amateur wine-taster is apt to overrate the strength of his head; above ground once more, the breath of the river brings him to a sense of his own incapacity for frequent and varied potations, and he shamefacedly betakes himself to a cab, to escape as quickly as may be from the scenes of his bibulous indiscretion.

On the dockside one encounters men of all nationalities--the swart Lascar, the dusky Suliote, the quiet pigtailed Chinaman, the grizzled negro; Germans, Swedes, stout little Dutchmen; Americans, Fins, Malays, Greeks, and Russians. Nowadays an English ship is a polyglot institution. In the Sailors' Home, near to the gates of St. Katharine's Docks, one may hear men conversing in all the European languages; in the Asiatic Home, close to the India Docks, there is such a confusion of tongues as dismayed the builders of Babel. Entering and departing, the owners of all these voices, and the thousands of dock labourers, lightermen, loafers, visitors, must pass the inspection of the police, who stand at the dock gates always on the watch, and who do not scruple to submit to close examination the garments of all those whose pockets may happen to bulge unduly, or who, having entered in the morning with a perfectly erect spine, stoop inexplainably at the shoulders when they have completed their business at night. In the docks there is a perfect system of espionage, and "the Queen's Tobacco Pipe," until recently located at the London, and now at the Victoria Docks, has smoked many thousands of little presents of tobacco that large-hearted sailors had intended for the gratification of their friends.

The long, narrow, grimy, and dissolute lane known to Englishmen everywhere as Ratcliff Highway, and now disguised under the name of St. George's Street East, begins its career near the gates of St. Katharine's Docks, and winds along like a great slimy snake towards Limehouse and Blackwall. It is unvisited of all those who have not business to transact with men who go down to the sea in ships; for this is peculiarly the sailors' quarter of London. Jack is to be encountered at every step, not infrequently reeling somewhat, and with a lady of loose manners on his arm. The shop-fronts are hidden behind strange collections of oil-skins, sea-boots, mattresses, blankets, and the miscellaneous assortment of articles specially provided for emigrants and sailors. The public-houses, of which there are many, resound with the noise of mechanical organs and string bands. The language one hears is of a strictly nautical description; and every third house or so is a lodging-house for sailors.

Of late years Ratcliff Highway has improved in character somewhat, and many of the men who were wont to be fleeced and robbed in it have been rescued from the crimps and sharpers by the Sailors' Home; but it has still much of its old disrepute left, and discreet persons do not perambulate it after nightfall without the escort of the police. Here the seafaring men of various nationalities separate themselves into groups, and form little colonies of their own. The public-house is their forum, to whatever nation they may belong. In one of these, English is spoken, in another German, in a third Norwegian, in a fourth Greek. Even the negroes have a special house of call of their own. As for the Chinamen, they prefer to smoke opium in quietness, and so they divide themselves between various Chinese lodging-houses, where they can eat, in the properly orthodox manner, with chopsticks, and assemble round a table at night to gamble with their friends. It is a strange, stirring, disordered place, Ratcliff Highway. Its population is changing with the arrival or departure of every ship, yet its aspect and its frequenters always seem to be the same, similar in manners, bent on the same amusements, afflicted by the same vices, reeling into or out of the same doors. There is nothing here except an occasional piece of nautical slang to suggest the jolly British tar. To a great extent, indeed, the tar has ceased to be either jolly or British. The majority of the sailors to be met with in Ratcliff Highway are visibly and distinctly foreign. There are no white "ducks," or raking straw hats; nobody publicly "shivers his timbers," or speaks in that mixed and technical language which helps to make the characters of Captain Marryat so delightful. Only on the stage is it nowadays possible to encounter the sailor of tradition. The seaman who frequents Ratcliff Highway outwardly resembles the stoker of a railway train, attired in his second best suit. There is nothing romantic about him, nothing picturesque; and if the river and the docks were not so near, and the shops were not so nautical-looking, and one's ears were not occasionally saluted with "How goes it, Captain?" and "Hallo, mate!" there would be nothing to suggest his connection with the sea.

All this was very different in Ned Ward's time, when that lively writer was collecting materials for his _London Spy_; very different, indeed, when men who are only now middle-aged were in the bloom of their youth. "Sometimes we met in the streets with a boat's-crew," says Ward, "just come on shore in search of those land debaucheries which the sea denies them; looking like such wild, staring, gamesome, uncouth animals, that a litter of squab rhinoceroses, dressed up in human apparel, could not have made a more ungainly appearance.... Every post they came to was in danger of having its head broken.... The very dogs in the street shunned them.... I could not forbear reflecting on the 'prudence' of those persons who send their unlucky children away to sea to tame and reform them." And well he might wonder at that same prudence now, if he saw how miserable and forlorn the British tar can look when his money is spent, and how little his appearance is suggestive of those high spirits which a life on the ocean wave is supposed to engender.

From Wapping, to which Ratcliff Highway will bring us, you may pass, through the famous Thames Tunnel, under the river to Rotherhithe. Not, however, as formerly, when the tunnel was reached by sets of circular stairs, and toyshop keepers drove a meagre business under a dripping and gigantic arch. At that period, the tunnel contained a central arcade lighted by gas; nowadays, it is so dark that no man can discern when he enters and when he leaves; for it has been absorbed into the great railway system, and instead of traversing it on foot one is whirled through it in a train, so that the traveller might be carried underneath the Thames, at a depth of more than seventy feet below the surface, without knowing that he had been on anything else but an ordinary underground railway. The Tunnel cost nearly half a million of money to construct, and twenty years elapsed--from 1823 to 1843--from the time when it was designed by Brunel and the day when it was opened to the public. As a place of resort for sight-seers it proved a gigantic failure; as a railway tunnel, it is a means of communication between the two most populous and busy districts of London.

Not that there are many signs of business to be encountered when one leaves the tunnel by means of the railway station at Rotherhithe. At the first glance the district round about seems quiet and sleepy and secluded. Mr. Walter Besant came upon it unexpectedly and with great joy, for here he found a world altogether in contrast with that which he had left a little higher up the Thames--houses of quiet old sailors, little churches and chapels, rows of small dwellings with flowers blooming on the window-sills, timber-yards and lagoons and canals, and a general air of retirement and repose. It is a narrow strip of shore, Rotherhithe. On one side it is washed by the Thames; on the other, it is hemmed in by the Surrey Commercial Docks. Sailor life in its better aspects is to be encountered here, for the neighbourhood has been haunted by seamen from Saxon times downwards, and the influence of the quaint older world has not yet passed away. It was through being a "sailor's haven," say the antiquaries, that Rotherhithe came by its name. Here Canute cut deep trenches, which, according to one of the friends of Samuel Pepys, who saw the remains of them in the course of a walk from Rotherhithe to Lambeth, were intended to divert the course of the Thames. At Rotherhithe Edward III. fitted out one of his fleets, and close upon its borders, in Bermondsey, lived some of our early kings.

The signs of the Rotherhithe inns--the "Swallow Galley," and the "Ship Argo"--seem to carry us back to "the stately times of great Elizabeth;" and though the place itself must have altered greatly since then, the manner of life of some of its inhabitants is much like that of their predecessors must have been when stout, high-decked ships sailed by on their way to the Spanish main, and Rotherhithe sent out its contingent of vessels and men to fight against the Invincible Armada.

All but completely cut off from the rest of the world for many generations, Rotherhithe has naturally made the river its highway, and so, leading off from its quiet, old-world streets, there are everywhere passages which end in boat-landings and stairs. The names of many of these latter recall memories of a bygone time. There are King and Queen Stairs, Globe Stairs, Shepherd and Dog Stairs, Redriff Stairs--Redriff being the name under which, at one time, Rotherhithe was known--and others that must have received their designations when most of the land beyond Rotherhithe was marsh and wilderness. When the tide is out the stairs are left high and dry, and the river becomes a narrow channel between muddy flats, on which barges lie grounded, and the ribs of old wrecks are to be seen, and a steamer heels carelessly over, one side of its keel washed by the lapping tide.

On the opposite side of the river lies Wapping; the unique spire of Limehouse Church is visible, rising high above masts, and roofs, and chimneys, a landmark for miles; Stepney stands proudly dominant on its elevated banks; and Ratcliff, half enveloped in thick atmosphere, proclaims itself by the gleaming sunlight on its multitudinous roofs. Of Wapping one cannot think without recalling one of the tenderest of English popular songs:--

"Your Molly has never been false, she declares, Since the last time we parted at Wapping Old Stairs; When I swore that I still would continue the same, And gave you the 'bacca-box, marked with my name."

Wapping Old Stairs are still discernible from the river, but are grievously difficult of identification, for, as at most other places along these shores, great warehouses have taken the place of most of the quaint-timbered old houses of former days. Yet at Wapping something of the old appearance of things is visible still. Leaning forward on to the shore, supported on mossy piles, green as the herbage of spring or brown as the weeds of the sea, are groups of strange old houses, with bay-windows, and overleaning balconies, and wooden walls, "clouted over" with planks until they look like a suit of mended clothes. The seafaring man's love of vivid colour is everywhere visible. The half-ruinous, time-worn buildings are painted after the manner of a Dutch barge--green contending with red, and raw yellow striving to hold its own against the imperial blue. In some of those curious accidental lights which are so frequent on the Thames, the low bank of Wapping assumes a peculiar glory of its own, heightened by the brown sails of barges sweeping past, and as full of colour as any picture which even Turner ventured to paint.

But from Wapping we must return once more to Rotherhithe, and to the Surrey Docks. They are ensconced in a graceful bend of the river, ere it curves back again round the far-projecting Isle of Dogs. There are, it is said, no older public docks in Great Britain, the Act by which the docks on the Surrey side were created bearing the date of 1696. Even before that period, indeed, there had been docks in the same situation "of considerable importance and benefit to the shipping." But docks which seemed large and important in the time of Queen Anne would be ridiculously small and inefficient with our present trade. The Howland Dock occupied ten acres when it was made; the Surrey Commercial Docks cover 330 acres now. They derive an historic and romantic interest from the fact that here the prize ships were brought to be delivered of their cargoes, when the jolly Jack Tar got his share of the prize-money, and, leave being granted, incontinently went off to squander it among his friends. There is a story of one such British sailor who entered the Bank of England with a warrant for twenty pounds, and exclaimed to the amused and amazed clerk:--"That will bother you, I reckon, mate; but never mind, if you haven't got the whole of the money in hand I'll take half of it now, and call for the rest another time, when it suits you."

From the lower portion of the Pool the river assumes wayward and eccentric habits, broadening and curving, and looking at every turn, when the tide is in, like a long chain of lakes. There is abundance of motion, and the freest wash of water, for the wind has large surfaces on which to play; and, also, the Thames is perpetually churned into long sweeping billows by the wheels of steamers passing to and fro. Henceforward every moderately straight portion of the river assumes the name of Reach, the meaning of which is obvious enough. There is first Limehouse Reach, then Greenwich Reach, and Blackwall Reach, and Bugsby Reach, and Woolwich Reach, and so onward to the magnificent reach at Gravesend. It is a devious course that is pursued by the vessels making their way down the Thames, but one which is full of perpetually varying interest, of ever-changing effects, of keen delight and breezy sensation to him who has the faculty of observing other things besides the muddiness of the Thames water.

Writing of this part of the river, Defoe describes grim sights in his "Journal of the Plague." He says of some of those who were terrified for their lives, that "they had recourse to ships for their retreat.... Where they did so, they had certainly the safest retreat of any people whatsoever; but the distress was such that people ran on board without bread to eat, and some into ships that had no men on board to remove them farther off, or to take the boat and go down the river to buy provisions where it might be safely done; and these often suffered and were infected as much on board as on shore. As the richer sort got into ships, so the lower rank got into hoys, smacks, lighters, and fishing-boats; and many, especially watermen, lay in their boats; but those made sad work of it, especially the latter, for, going about for provision, and perhaps to get their subsistence, the infection got in among them and made fearful havock. Many of the watermen died alone in their wherries, as they rid at their roads, and were not found till they were in no condition for anybody to touch, or come near them." A grim picture of a weird imagination! Is it possible to form a conception of anything more awful than these boats, floating up and down with the tide, unnoticed, masterless, unowned, with their dreadful burden of bodies dead of the Plague?

The Isle of Dogs is only an island because it is cut across by the entrances to the East and West India Docks. It is a vast space of dock property, hidden behind devious streets and towering wharves. Originally it was "the Isle of Ducks," the ducks to which allusion was made having a vast swamp to wade and flounder in, and a solitude peculiarly their own. Considerably less than a century, however, has sufficed to change the whole aspect of the place. Where the ducks disported themselves are now situated the East and West India and the Millwall Docks. Originally an attempt was made to construct a shorter course for vessels passing up and down the Thames. A new passage was made straight through the peninsula, where the West India Dock is now situated, but this, like the Thames Tunnel, proved to be a sad failure, vessels maintaining their course round "the unlucky Isle of Dogges," just as they did in Pepys' time. Round the long curve, engineering and ship-building yards have arisen, with houses of workmen attached thereto. The isle is populous, and dismal; and he would be a shrewd observer who should guess that it had not been built on till shortly after the century began.

One of the illustrations accompanying this narrative (page 313) represents a bend of the river at Millwall. It conveys, with much completeness, an idea of the character of the banks. Near by, a little further up the river, is the entrance to Millwall Docks. The name arises from the fact that, in former days, the only buildings on the Isle of Dogs were windmills. One of them was left till quite recent years, a quaint Dutch-looking structure, built very solid, to resist the high winds that blew unimpeded over the dismal peninsula, which even the ducks had abandoned.

A little lower down the river there were erstwhile landmarks of another sort. Gaunt gibbet-posts stood along the shore, with bones of pirates bleaching upon them, and music of creaking chains. A reminiscence of this variety of ancient Thames scenery survives in the name of Execution Dock, which designation is only less repellant than another favourite place-name of the same period--Hanging Ditch, to wit.

The docks at Millwall are chiefly employed by steamers of large tonnage trading between London and the various European and American ports. Great bands of emigrants set out from here to the New World, and as their ships swing into the river there is much signalling to friends on shore and much pathetic leave-taking on the decks.

The docks are two, joined by a bridge, and a tonnage of more than 1,000,000, "gross register," passes in and out annually. Ready access to the railways is to be found at Millwall, but many of the vessels unload into dumb-barges, which swarm all over the Millwall waters, one man on board each barge, propelling his craft with a pole, and seeming to take his labour like a light recreation, and as if there were not the slightest need for hurry in all the world. These dumb-barges, sluggish and unwieldy, it is the common habit to denounce as one of the nuisances of the Thames. They float upward or downward with the tide; they are now "end on" across the river, floating sideways, and now lazily making a tolerably straight course; they get in the way of passing steamers, and are indescribably slow in getting out again. The single man on board seems to be influenced by the habit of the craft which he controls. He steadfastly declines to regard himself as an inconvenience, and if the tide drifts him into the middle of the stream he makes no haste to leave a clear course again, but prods slowly away with his long pole, utterly careless of mankind, and with an indifference to oath and objurgation which is positively sublime.

Compared to those at Millwall, the East and West India Docks, stretching right across the neck of the peninsula, and making an island of it in fact as well as in name, are of really gigantic dimensions. A few years ago it was possible to declare, with a fair amount of truth, that the West India Docks were the largest in the world. From the land side they are approached by Commercial Road, the smaller of the two great highways which are the main arteries of East London. At the first glance the unsuspecting stranger might easily be led into supposing that he had come suddenly upon an important series of fortifications. The stone archway, crowned by a stumpy tower, which forms the entrance, is impressively massive, and even forbidding; the surrounding walls are very high, and seem to frown down a not unnatural curiosity to penetrate their secret; there is also a ditch which suggests a moat, and which looks as if the constructors had contemplated the possibility of having some day to cut off all communication with the docks otherwise than by water. Altogether, the West India Docks convey the impression that they are carefully guarded and somewhat mysterious, so that the nervous stranger within their gates traverses them not without fear and trembling, and is apt to become alarmed lest he should inadvertently trespass beyond his scanty privileges.

And from the Thames, also, the West India Docks look important and imposing, the tall warehouses rising as high as the masts of the vessels which break the regularity of their fronts, thus forming one of the most striking objects of the north shore. Of all the docks on the river, none is so likely to convey a concrete idea of the vastness of our trade, of the manner in which British intelligence and enterprise draw to the heart of London the spoils of the whole world. "I would say to the intelligent foreigner," exclaims one lively writer on the subject, "look around and see the glory of England! Not in huge armies bristling with bayonets, and followed by monstrous guns; not in granite forts, grinning from the waters like ghouls from graves; not in lines of circumvallation, miles and miles in extent; not in earthworks, counterscarps, bastions, ravelins, mamelons, casemates, and gunpowder magazines, lies our pride and our strength. Behold them in yonder forests of masts, in the flags of every nation that fly from those tapering spars on the ships, in the great argosies of commerce that from every port in the world have congregated to do honour to the monarch of marts, London, and pour out the riches of the universe at her proud feet."

It is impossible in any brief description to give more than a general idea of the extent of accommodation for commerce provided by the warehouses, sheds, and cellars of the West India Docks. The rum shed alone, with cellars corresponding in size, covers a space of 200,000 square feet. In one building vast quantities of tea are stored, in another, innumerable bags of fragrant coffee; here are sheds full of solid blocks of mahogany, yonder are bags of indigo, boxes of fruit, bales of cotton, bundles of hides, and sacks of tallow. The average number of vessels lying at one time in the East and West India Docks is 215, all ships of large tonnage. The Dock Company keeps 2,500 persons in regular employment for the loading and unloading of ships, and employs as casual labourers nearly 3,000 men besides.

The London dock labourer, to whom of late much public sympathy has been extended, is of two classes. The regular labourer, since the great strike, has been fairly well paid for an unskilled artisan, and is assured of constant employment. The casual labourer, with whom in many cases hard work is a new experience, is in a very different case. The starving and the outcast of all classes, to whom the whole of London holds out no other prospect of employment, stream down as a last resort to the Isle of Dogs, a sort of "going to the dogs" which is very grimly real. In some cases, when additional labourers are wanted, handfuls of tickets are thrown out among the eager and struggling crowd, and he who is fortunate enough in the scramble to secure one of these is provided with half a day's labour; in others, a foreman stationed at the gates secures the men he desires by scanning the throng and pointing to one and to another who seems most capable of hard labour, or in most need. It is a sad, a distressingly pathetic sight, this almost fiendish struggle for a few hours' work; and amongst those who engage in it are men of fair birth, of good education, of proved ability, but of irretrievably fallen fortunes, and with characters irrecoverably lost.

When the India merchants created the West India Docks they had a capital of half a million pounds sterling. Enormous is the capital that has now been sunk on the estate. At one time, when the owners had made a larger profit than they were permitted by Act of Parliament to divide, they bought a quantity of copper and roofed their warehouses with that expensive material. The wharves, warehouses, and quays have now a storage capacity of over 170,000 tons; in the cellars 14,000 sheep can be stored; the weekly wages paid at the West India Docks alone amount to £5,000; the revenue of the company owning them is close on £400,000 a year. Then there are the East India Docks beside--the docks that are sung about in fo'castle songs, that are haunted by the wives and sweethearts of sailors on the look-out for the good ship that is homeward bound, that are dreamed of by Jack Tar when he is thousands of miles away on the sea.

"Why?" asked Mr. W. Clark Russell, "are the East India Docks the most popular of all docks among sailors?" "There are two reasons," was the reply. "Until the Victoria Dock was opened these docks were the lowest down the river. They were consequently the first at which a ship arrived on her return home. The East India Dock was always so popular, owing to its convenience, compactness, and management, that, whenever there was room, and arrangements would admit, ships entered it. The advantage was great to the sailor. Once on shore, he had nothing to do but jump into the train on the pier-head and be off. Another reason was, the East India Dock was the home of the emigrant ship; and as it was the first place where Jack met his Polly, so it was the last place in which he bade her farewell and took his glass of grog."

Along the bank of the Thames, opposite to the Isle of Dogs, lie, making a long semicircle of streets, the twin towns of Deptford and Greenwich. Behind them rise the Kentish hills, dark with trees, among which the shadows seem continually to sleep. Deptford is redolent of historic memories. Its old church, with embattled tower, easily perceived from the river, contains the bones of Captain Edward Fenton, one of Frobisher's companions; Drake was knighted here, on board his own ship, by that unmarried queen who so appropriately ruled our country in the most adventurous period of English history. Here, Peter the Great came to learn ship-building, residing at Sayes Court, the house of the precise John Evelyn, who complains grievously of the semi-barbarian monarch who broke down his hedges, and filled his house with "people right nasty." Master Samuel Pepys, Clerk of the Acts of the Navy, was necessarily a more frequent visitor to Deptford, and he records, very early in his famous Diary, how he repaired to Deptford after sermon, "where," he says, "at the Commissioner's and the Globe we staid long; but no sooner in bed but we had an alarm, and so we rose; and the Comptroller comes into the Yard to us; and seamen of all the present ships repair to us, and there we armed with every one a handspike, with which they were as fierce as could be. At last we hear that it was five or six men who did ride through the guard in the towne, without stopping to the guard that was there, and, some say, shot at them; but all being quiet there, we caused the seamen to go on board again."

Up to quite recent years Deptford was famous for its dockyard, established by Henry VIII., and employed in the construction of vessels of war through the greater part of three centuries. The site is occupied by a dockyard no longer; convicts are no more brought to labour in gangs on the construction of men-of-war; there is no sound of hammers, nor any shouting of overseers; the keel of no mighty ship is being laid; the greatness of Deptford has departed with the era of our wooden walls.

But as Deptford has lost its importance in our naval system it has become one of the centres of our trade. Facing the river, like the vanished dockyard, and occupying a portion of its former site, is the great collection of buildings known as the Foreign Cattle Market. All cattle landed in London from abroad are brought here to be slaughtered, and in the vast shambles, which no person of nice tastes should think of visiting, beasts are being killed and dressed and quartered from morning to night, with an expedition which strikes the beholder as something unnatural and amazing. From Deptford, it is probable, proceeds the greater portion of London's meat supply, and even Smithfield gives a less striking idea of the vast capacity of Englishmen for the consumption of animal food than do the Deptford shambles.

Near the point to which we have now come the Ravensbourne enters the Thames, and with it the first black instalment of the sewage of London. The little river rises on Keston Heath, and flows sweetly through a lovely country, wandering, as a poet has sung--

"In Hayes and Bromley, Beckingham Vale And straggling Lewisham, to where Deptford Bridge Uprises in obedience to the flood."

On the bridge stands the boundary stone which marks the extremity of Surrey and the beginning of Kent, and just beyond it, a little nearer to the Thames, are stationed, above ground, one of the sewage pumping stations of the London County Council, and, below, the point of meeting of some of the principal sewers of southeast London.

Before us when we return to the river lies Greenwich Reach, broad and beautiful, uncrowded by shipping, with curious half-wooden houses on our right, with shoals of boats drawn up on the shore with the magnificent front of Greenwich Hospital reflecting itself in the waters. On the high bank above the landing-stage there is an obelisk erected to Belot, the Arctic explorer, unimpressive and meagre enough in itself, but beautiful as a tribute of praise from Englishmen to a daring sailor of another, and, for many centuries, a hostile nation.

At Greenwich we are enjoined to

"Kneel and kiss the consecrated earth."

It was the hospital which was thus alluded to as the means of consecration, but the glorious building is not a hospital any more. The fine old sea-dogs who used to find shelter here, and narrate to each other the story of their adventures on all the seas of the world, preferred fourteen shillings a week and their pension outside the walls to the liberal rations and the small allowance of money to which they were entitled by their residence indoors; so the place famous to all Englishmen through many generations has become a Royal Naval College, where young officers and engineers are trained in the technical and scientific branches of their work.

The site is one of the most illustrious to be found within the sea-washed borders of the British Isles. Here did the first of those who "dined with Duke Humphrey" come to carouse, for here Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had a manor-house, which he rebuilt and embattled, enclosing what is now known as Greenwich Park. Humphrey's choice of a site for his residence was approved by many an English king, for Edward IV. finished and beautified the Duke of Gloucester's palace; Henry VII. made it his favourite residence; Henry VIII., his brother, the Duke of Somerset, the Queens Mary and Elizabeth, were born within its walls; there the young King Edward died, and, a few days before his death, was lifted up to the windows by his courtiers, that his clamorous people might perceive him to be still living. Greenwich Palace was to Queen Elizabeth what Osborne is to Queen Victoria; James I. was wont to escape to it from London; the unfortunate Charles made it his home; and when his son, who "never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," came to his throne, he determined to build at Greenwich the finest royal palace England had ever had. "To Greenwich by water," writes Pepys, "and there landed at the King's House, which goes on slow, but is very pretty.... Away to the king and back again with him to the barge, hearing him and the duke talk, and seeing and observing their manner of discourse. And good Lord forgive me, though I admire them with all the duty possible, yet the more a man considers and observes them, the less he finds of difference between them and other men."

The building which Pepys had seen in course of erection, occupying the ancient site of "the Manor of Pleasaunce," as the palace at Greenwich was wont to be called, owes its present magnificence to the genius of Wren, and its dedication to the purposes of a naval hospital to the humanity of the Consort of William III. "Had the king's life been prolonged till the works were completed," writes Macaulay, "a statue of her who was the real foundress of the institution would have had a conspicuous place in that court which presents two lofty domes and two graceful colonnades to the multitudes who are perpetually passing up and down the imperial river. But that part of the plan was never carried into effect; and few of those who now gaze on the noblest of European hospitals are aware that it is a memorial of the virtues of the good Queen Mary, of the love and sorrow of William, and of the great victory of La Hogue."

The battle of La Hogue was fought on the 24th of May, 1692. It concluded a "great conflict which had raged during five days over a wide extent of sea and shore." The English had gained no such victory over the French for centuries, and England, in spite of much popular sympathy with James, in whose interest our ancient enemies had planned the invasion of our country, went wild with enthusiasm. Many of the wounded were brought to London and lodged in the hospitals of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, and it was shortly afterwards announced by the queen, in her husband's name, that the building commenced by Charles should be completed as a retreat for seamen disabled in the service of their country. However, as Mr. Ruskin observes in reference to the crown of wild olive, "Jupiter was poor." Little progress was made with the new hospital during Queen Mary's life, but on her decease her husband resolved to make it her monument. The inscription on the frieze of the hall gives to the queen all the honour of the great design; and though the hospital has now been diverted to other uses, the memory of what it once was can never perish, and the grand edifice will remain to Englishmen for ever

"The noblest structure imaged on the wave, A nation's grateful tribute to the brave."

Wren's subject seems to have inspired his higher genius, and none of his works, not even St. Paul's, is a worthier memorial of his powers.

It was Charles II. who planted the trees of Greenwich Park, now remarkable for their great size and nobleness. From the crown of the steep ascent on which the Observatory stands, once the site of "Duke Humphrey's Tower," there spreads before the observer one of the broadest and most impressive prospects to be encountered anywhere round about London. Far down below lie, first, the Naval School, and then the two great wings of the hospital, each lifting its beautiful dome aloft into the blue of the sky; in front, the eye wanders, over the Albert and Victoria Docks, to the valleys of the Lea and the Roding; to the left, the river, broader than at any previous portion of its course, bends suddenly round the Isle of Dogs, beyond which lies London, dim and distant, its white towers and spires gleaming out of the haze, its great cross of St. Paul's glittering in the sunlight; to the right, the Thames--laden with ships, alive with barges--flows on, a wide shining space of water, past ship-building yards, and warehouses, and dry docks, until it loses itself in the grey distance of the Kent and Essex marshes.

Where the Lea--Walton's river--after flowing through Bedfordshire, by pleasant Hertford, on to Enfield, and Edmonton, and Bow, ends in an estuary of unfathomable mud, and joins the Thames at Blackwall, we are near to the entrance of the Victoria Docks.

At Blackwall, docks were being constructed in Pepys' day, and he makes this curious entry in his Diary:--"1665, Sept. 22nd. At Blackwall, there is observable what Johnson tells us, that, in digging a late Docke, they did twelve feet underground find perfect trees over-covered with earth. Nut trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them; some of whose nuts he showed us. Their shells black with age, and their kernell, upon opening, decayed, but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And a yew tree (upon which the very ivy was taken up whole about it), which, upon cutting with an addes, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is." Similar curiosities, it is probable, lie waiting for discovery all along the Thames shore; and at the "New Falcon" at Gravesend there is a perfect specimen of moss, with still just a tint of green remaining in its fronds, which has been dug up from many feet below the surface at Tilbury.

Far down the river the docks are spreading--growing longer, and deeper, and roomier with the necessities of our trade. From the entrance to Victoria Dock at Blackwall to that of the Albert Dock at North Woolwich is a distance of more than three miles. The Albert Dock itself is a long, straight expanse of two miles of water, lined on either side by great ocean steamers lying stem to stern. It is always resounding with the "Yo, heave oh!" of sailors, the shouts of bargemen, the cries of dock labourers, the screaming and panting of steam-cranes, the exclamations of bewildered passengers on the look-out for the vessel which is to bear them over seas. Up the River Thames every year there makes its way a vast fleet of 6,000 steamers and 5,000 sailing vessels, with an aggregate of 6,000,000 tons burden. To one who desires to understand clearly what life, and excitement, and perpetual going and coming this entails, there could be no more stirring or instructive sight than the Victoria and Albert Docks. Some of the great steamers are like floating streets, almost as populous, with rooms like palaces, and decks as clean as village hearthstones. From gigantic port-holes strange wild faces and turbaned heads look out; the quays swarm with coolies in blue and white tunics, with negroes in cast-off garments from Wapping, with Chinamen in curious pointed shoes, and pigtails neatly tied up for convenience. Above decks the officers may be heard giving their orders in Hindostanee; the red-turbaned sailors speak to their mates in unknown tongues; the howl with which a rope is hauled in or a bale is lowered is not unlike the cry of tigers in the jungle.

The Victoria Dock is very roomy, and comparatively quiet. It is a series of great basins, with surrounding quays and projecting jetties. Here are vast tobacco warehouses, and coal-sidings, and cellars for frozen meat. Not many passengers come to or depart from Victoria Dock, which is used chiefly by cargo steamers, bringing for the consumption of Englishmen every variety of foreign produce. The tobacco warehouses are one of the sights of dock-side London. They contain as much tobacco, in bales of raw leaf, as would seem to be a sufficient supply, not for England alone, but for the whole world, for many years to come. The refrigerating chambers, spreading far underground, and designed for the reception of frozen meat from Australia, New Zealand, the River Plate, and Russia, provide accommodation for no less than 60,000 carcases. At the Victoria Dock are now located the furnace and chimney which jointly make up "the Queen's Pipe." Here, also, are landed many of the cattle which are slaughtered on the other side of the river, at Deptford.

The Royal Albert Dock was opened for traffic no longer ago than the year 1880. It is used by the great lines of passenger steamers--the Peninsular and Oriental, the British India, the Orient, the Star, and a score of others. Immense sheds run alongside the quay, capable of storing a prodigious number of cargoes, and a vessel may be unloaded and loaded in the course of a few hours. In the centre of the basin there is a movable crane, which will take up a waggon containing twenty tons of coal, and empty it in a few seconds into the hold of a ship. The Royal Albert is at once the most pleasant and the most exciting of all the docks of London. From the quays, it looks like part of a great river unusually busy with ships. There is no cessation of activity from the dawn of the day until dark. By one tide a great steamer is departing for Australia, by another for Calcutta or Bombay. It is no unusual thing to find that five or six great ocean steamships are timed to leave the dock on a single day, to sail for ports so widely divided as Sydney, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Port Natal, Japan, and the River Plate. So important, indeed, has become the traffic of the Albert Dock that it has become necessary to make for it a new inlet from the Thames.

Between the river and these gigantic docks lies the little colony of Silvertown, still looking new and clean, so recently has it been founded on the verge of the Essex marshes. Originally the Messrs. Silver commenced a rubber manufactory here, and, finding how far they were from the centres of population, had to build rows of cottages for their workpeople. Silvertown is now renowned for its electrical engineers, and has become quite a busy and prosperous centre of industry.

But in reaching Silvertown we have almost missed the fine sweep of Woolwich Reach, which is just as long as the Albert Dock, and is one of the most beautiful stretches of the Thames. When night has settled down upon the river, and the moon makes "a lane of beams" along the slowly heaving water, and the lights burning on the misty banks tremulously reflect themselves in broken pillars of flame, Woolwich Reach, with its level shores, and its indications of great activities in temporary repose, is in itself sufficient to relieve the Lower Thames of the common and vulgar reproach that it lacks beauty. There is a quiet, solemn, lapping of the waters; barges at rest, sailing ships at anchor, a yacht lying here and there, break the line of the sky with their tapering masts and their sails partially furled; a belated steam-tug pants upward, with asthmatic breath, and from either shore comes the dull regular throb of half-suspended life. The Lower Thames is never so imposing as in the night-time, when the moon is pouring down long streaks of light on the throbbing waters, and even the brown piles of the river bank seem tinged with gold.

The three prominent objects on the Woolwich side are the barracks, the dockyard, and the arsenal. Not that the arsenal can be said to be very prominent, either, for it lies by the side of the river like a low line of sheds, very bare and poor-looking, very disappointing, very unlike what one would expect the chief arsenal of England to be. The barracks alone relieve Woolwich from monotony. They rise high above the town, with their great central quadrangle, and its four spires, looking not unlike an enlargement of the Tower of London. Not far away rises the square tower of Woolwich Church, with a populous graveyard beneath, climbing over the summit of a hill. The houses of Woolwich rise above each other like irregular terraces, for here the land is more abrupt and uneven than elsewhere on Thames-side, as if it were asserting itself before it came to the dead level of the neighbouring marshes.

The once-famous dockyard, closed in 1869, is represented by great, empty, stone spaces, sloping to the river, and a pair of large, singular-looking sheds, stored full of gun-carriages and implements of war. Looking on it nowadays, it is hard to believe that up to comparatively recent years it was employed in the construction of our navy. No hammers resound there now, and the dockyard, silent and sleeping, might well be the type of an age of national amity and absolute peace.

But not so with the arsenal, which is busy night and day in forging the bolts of war. A while ago a shower of military rockets burst upwards from this busy centre of martial industry, spreading some ruin and much consternation throughout the towns of North and South Woolwich, scattering to right and to left, and penetrating the walls of houses situated a mile or so from the opposite bank of the Thames. Such accidents are always possible, despite the extremest care, and Woolwich sleeps, like Naples, in more or less constant fear of eruption. The choice of the place as a site for the Royal Arsenal was brought about by the discovery there of a kind of sand peculiarly adapted for fine castings, a fact which may help to explain the derivation of the name from Wule-wich, "the village in the bay." On the opposite side of the river, under the shadow of the trees which line the banks below North Woolwich Pier, elephants may occasionally be seen wandering, as calmly as if this were their natural habitat, for here are the North Woolwich Gardens, where, as at Rosherville, lower down the river, the folk of East London come now and then to "spend a happy day."

Off Woolwich, lies the _Warspite_, a noble example of those English frigates which did good service when England was still defended by its wooden walls. And the _Warspite_, which was formerly known as the _Conqueror_, is doing extremely good service now, for it is the training-ship of the Marine Society, which, at the suggestion of Jonas Hanway, the first Englishman who had the courage to carry an umbrella, was formed in 1772 for the purpose of equipping wretched and neglected boys for the sea. Since that date 60,000 boys, none of them criminals, but many in great danger of falling into crime, have passed through the Society's hands, and have started life with honest purposes. A finer looking lot of lads than those who swarm about the decks and the rigging of the _Warspite_ it would be difficult to find even in a public school, and it is a proud day for the Marine Society when, once a year, a _fête_ is celebrated on board the noble old war vessel, and the boys go through their evolutions in the presence of Royal and distinguished strangers.

Admiral Luard, who commanded the _Warspite_ whilst it was still called the _Conqueror_, and carried a thousand sailors and marines, related a few years ago how narrow an escape it had of going down with all hands. Overtaken in a typhoon off Sumatra, it lay for many hours on its beam ends, its hold fast filling with water, and altogether in a condition so hopeless that all on board gave themselves up for lost. However, good seamanship and excellent behaviour on the part of the men saved the vessel to perform its present humane duty, and to endure as a type and example of the sort of ship which once maintained our supremacy on all the seas of the world.

Below Woolwich the Thames flows through low-lying lands, flat and marshy, bounded at the distance of a mile or more by thickly-wooded hills, at the feet of which nestle here and there grey church towers, and little red villages, and occasional small towns. Looking down over Plumstead, which is a singularly prosaic place in a remarkable fine situation, the river is a mere thin streak, running between artificial banks, like those of a Dutch canal. Over the green marshland below us the river was once wont to spread itself like a great inland sea; and at various periods, since stout walls were built to confine it to a reasonable course, it has burst open its barriers and flooded the country for mile on mile. In this manner was created Dagenham Breach, where the river wall now encloses Dagenham Lake, famous for its bream fishing. On the Plumstead side the river wall was broken down in Queen Elizabeth's reign, and repaired at tremendous cost. Dagenham Breach, on the opposite shore, between where the River Roding and Raynham Creek open on the Thames, was made so late as 1707, when the swollen river, breaking down its barriers, rushed over 1,000 acres of land, and carried 120 acres into the stream. The land swept away made a sand-bank a mile in length, and stretching half-way across the river. The damage was afterwards repaired by Captain Perry, who had been engineer to Peter the Great, and who was voted £15,000 for an undertaking which had cost him £40,472 18s. 8-3/4 d.

The land enclosed by the Thames' walls is mainly waste, but has a quiet, singular beauty, which would be more appreciated, doubtless, but for the fact that here, on either bank, London pours its two immense streams of sewage into the river. Where the Plumstead and the Erith marshes join each other, there may be seen at low tide a couple of culverts, from which issue, twice a day, two thick, black, poisonous streams. Just above them there is a substantial pier, and further back, a large white building with a tall chimney, beside which the Nelson column would seem to be dwarfed. Further back still, surrounding a covered reservoir, there is a quadrangle of small, neat houses, occupied by some of the workpeople of the London County Council. These are the sewage works at Cross Ness. They are surrounded by gardens, inside which the ground rises abruptly to the height of the dykes. All around seems clean and pleasant, but underneath, built on arches of the Roman aqueduct pattern, there is a huge reservoir, which receives most of the sewage of the south side of the Thames. The large white building which was first discernible is the pumping station, where there are four great engines capable of lifting 120,000,000 gallons of sewage in the twenty-four hours. For sixteen hours each day the sewage is being pumped up from low-lying culverts into the reservoir; for four hours at each tide it is being liberated into the Thames, which thereafter, for some miles, becomes a pestilential river, bearing its dark and unwholesome burden up and down and round about with every tide.

One might stand on the quiet Plumstead marshes and suspect nothing whatever of all this. From thence the river is made invisible by its dyke; but one observes, with an interest not unmixed with wonder, the funnel of a steamer skirting along the level landscape, or the rich brown sail of a Thames barge, or the bellying canvas of one of those sailing-vessels which, to the number of 5,000 annually, still make use of the port of the Thames.

The larger sewer works of what is called the Northern Outfall are situated on the opposite side of the river, at Barking, where there still remains a relic of the once famous Barking Abbey--the ancient curfew tower, from which the inhabitants were wont to be warned to extinguish their fires. Barking Abbey, which was a foundation of the Benedictine order, dates back to the year 670, and was the first convent for women in England. It originated with the Saxon saint, Erkenwald, Bishop of London, whose sister, Ethelburgha, was its first abbess. This lady made the convent, so renowned that two queens--the wives of Henry I. and of King Stephen--thought it an honour to be appointed to the office which so distinguished a woman had held. All the abbesses of Barking were baronesses in their own right, and took precedence of all abbesses in England. The last of the long line was Dorothy Barley, who was compelled to surrender the abbey to "Bluff King Hal" in 1539. The abbey church stood just outside the present churchyard, and was 170 feet long, with a transept of 150 feet. The curfew tower is the old gate of the outer court, and the room, of which the window is shown in the engraving on the next page, was anciently the chapel of the Holy Rood. In the near neighbourhood is the house from which Lord Monteagle carried to the king a warning not to attend the Houses of Parliament on the day fixed for the carrying out of the Gunpowder Plot.

In Barking--sometimes called Tripcock--Reach we are afloat on a tide of sewage. It discolours the water all around; it is sometimes churned up by the wheels of the paddle-steamers; the odour of it assails the nostrils at every turn; and yet Barking Reach is, with this exception, an altogether delightful place on a spring or summer day, all the more delightful if the day is one which follows upon or precedes a day of rain; for the sky should be full of grey clouds and capricious light to do justice to the landscape below Barking Reach. Fortunately, even a vast burden of sewage, the refuse of the mightiest city in the world, cannot destroy the natural beauty of the river. By Erith and at Greenhithe it beslimes the low, muddy flats left exposed by the receding tide; but out in the centre of the Thames how can it avail against the influence of wind, and cloud, and sunlight? The river smiles and sparkles, and reflects grey cloud and blue sky, just as if it had no secrets to hide; and over the flat meadow-lands the shadows chase each other like happy children at play. Steamers, barges, sailing-vessels, coming and going, are almost as frequent here as in the higher reaches. It is the peculiarity of the Thames that it is never forsaken, or solitary, or at rest.

On either bank, unsuspected by the chance excursionist, are frequent powder magazines, which are a sort of introduction to Purfleet, where there is such a store of explosives as, if they were fired, would shake London to its centre, and possibly to its foundations. At Purfleet, by the way, the river banks vary their monotony by rising up sheer and white, in modest imitation of the chalk cliffs of Folkestone and Dover. As we proceed further down the river the smell of chalk-burning will taint the air somewhat disagreeably, and great white clouds of smoke will fly in our faces and almost hide the sky.

Purfleet is a pretty and interesting town, notwithstanding the uses to which it has been put, and the danger there must always be in living there. The chalk hills are crowned with pleasant woods, and over the river one looks across Greenhithe to the Kentish hills. Of the country in that direction Cobbett, writing his "Rural Rides," had only a disparaging account to give. "The surface is ugly by nature," he said, "to which ugliness there has just been made a considerable addition by the enclosure of a common, and by the sticking up of some shabby-genteel houses, surrounded with dead fences and things called gardens, in all manner of ridiculous forms, making, all together, the bricks, hurdle-gates, and earth say, as plainly as they can speak, 'Here dwell Vanity and Poverty.'" But Cobbett was by preference unjust, and the little grey houses, each with its own circle of trees, are an essential portion of the charm of these riverside landscapes, which, else, would look dead and solitary.

Off Purfleet, on one of whose chalky cliffs the standard of England was unfolded when the Spanish Armada threatened our liberties, lies the reformatory training-ship _Cornwall_, once known as the _Wellesley_, the flagship of the brave and adventurous Lord Dundonald. These handsome old hulks, some of them used as reformatories, some of them as training-ships for boys who have been rescued from poverty, and one large group as a fever and small-pox hospital, are very frequent between Erith and Northfleet, and greatly increase the interest of a voyage down the Thames. Off Greenhithe, a famous yachting centre, the _Arethusa_ and the _Chichester_ lie moored; at Gray's Thurrock, on the opposite side of the river, lie the _Exmouth_ and the _Shaftesbury_, the latter being the vessel which has been found so costly by the London School Board.

The good-looking town of Erith faces the river just above Purfleet, half-surrounded in the summer months by a fleet of small yachts at anchor; and, just below, the Rivers Cray and Darent, making a clear fork of shining water, meet together and flow as one stream into the Thames. "Long Reach" Tavern, a quaint, solitary place, once much frequented in the old prize-fighting, cockfighting days, by persons who are usually spoken of as belonging to "the sporting fraternity," stands on the flat muddy ground of this estuary of the conjoined rivers; and from this point the River Thames bends inland towards Dartford, again taking a new direction at Ingress Abbey, where Alderman Harmer once lived, in a house built out of the stones of old London Bridge.

Around Ingress Abbey lies the village of Greenhithe, another yachting station, with forty feet of water at the end of the pier at low tide. Stone Church, said to have been designed by the architect of Westminster Abbey, and beautiful and elaborate enough in some parts of it to suggest close kinship with that great edifice, stands on a proud eminence above the village, and is visible for miles around.

At Greenhithe the cement works commence, and extend themselves to Northfleet, which is a town perpetually enveloped in a cloud of white smoke, floating over the river in great wreaths, so that Tilbury and Gravesend, lying only a brief distance away, are in some states of weather completely hidden from sight until Northfleet has been passed.

To Tilbury is now to fall the often forfeited glory of containing the largest docks in the world. The heavy traffic of the Thames is gradually being arrested at a lower portion of the river. "One thing hangs upon another," remarks a recent writer, "and just as Tenterden Steeple is accountable for Goodwin Sands, so the Suez Canal is responsible for the Albert Dock, and for those that are being made at Tilbury. The long, weight-carrying iron screws that are built to run through the canal are not adapted for the turnings and windings of Father Thames in the higher reaches, and so, after the fashion of Mahomet, the docks now are sliding down the river to the ships instead of the ships coming up the river to the docks." Thus it happened that some years ago the population of Gravesend began to be increased by immense gangs of navvies, builders, and masons, who during the day-time were engaged on the Tilbury side of the river in digging vast trenches, building huge walls, and scooping out of the peat and clay accommodation for the merchant navy of England.

The new docks at Tilbury are the property of the East and West India Dock Company, which is forestalling competition by thus competing with itself. They are being dug out of what has for centuries been a great muddy waste. An army of nearly 3,000 labourers has been employed on the excavations. When the docks are completed eight large steamers will be able to take in coal at one time; the largest vessels built will be able to enter the gates with ease; there will be wharves and warehouses capable of accommodating no inconsiderable portion of the entire trade of the Thames. Branch lines of railway will run along the wharves, and be connected with each warehouse. The main dock occupies fifty-three acres of ground. The jetties surrounding the basins will be forty-five feet wide. At Tilbury, it is probable, the great work of furnishing dock accommodation for the shipping using the Thames will be finally brought to an end. It is all but impossible to imagine that the time will ever arrive when the Albert, and Victoria, and Tilbury, and East and West India Docks, will be too small for the demands of a trade almost inconceivably greater than that which passes through the Port of London now.

The proximity of this prodigious undertaking has driven away much of the solitariness which, for some centuries past, has hung around Tilbury Fort. That renowned but practically valueless fortification is best known through the popular engraving after Clarkson Stanfield's picture. That artist, however, has used a painter's license to the full. He has given to Tilbury Fort a massiveness and a dignity to which it can by no means lay claim. It is, on the contrary, rather mean-looking, and is only saved from insignificance by its great stone gateway, which is a sort of loftier Temple Bar.

It was when, in 1539, three strange ships appeared in the Downs, "none knowing what they were, nor what they intended to do," that the idea of building a fort at Tilbury arose. Henry VIII., alarmed at possibilities, built bulwarks and block-houses both at Tilbury and Gravesend. It is stated, on authority which is somewhat doubtful, that Queen Elizabeth reviewed her troops at this place when the realm was threatened by the Spanish Armada, and that here she declared that she thought it "foul scorn that the Pope or any other foreign prince should dare to interfere with her." On authority that is still more than doubtful, she is said to have slept in the one room over the great gateway. The statement that an Irish regiment, stationed here just before the abdication of James II., crossed the river and burnt and pillaged Gravesend, but was afterwards defeated with great slaughter, is more authentic. At Tilbury Fort, Sheridan has laid the scene of the burlesque tragedy embodied in _The Critic_, the heroine of that piece being the Governor's daughter, who went mad in white satin, to the accompaniment of her faithful friend and companion, who considered it to be part of her duty to go out of her senses in white linen, as became the meaner condition of one who was paid to serve. A great mystery is preserved concerning Tilbury Fort by the military authorities, and any stray artist found sketching in its neighbourhood is usually treated as if he were making drawings for the advantage of the enemies of his country.

And now, having passed the Gardens at Rosherville, ingeniously constructed out of old chalk-pits, having seen Tilbury old and new, and having come to the end of this portion of our journey by water, it is time for us to land at Gravesend, where Hogarth and his merry companions put up at "Mrs. Bramble's," and, it is probable, took shrimps and tea. Gravesend, let it be said at once, is rapidly losing some of its most pleasant features. Coal-staithes and wharves have invaded the picturesque foreshore. Very dull and depressing is the entrance to the town, after passing those wonderfully grotesque baths which were built according to the sham Oriental taste popularised by George IV., who, as Praed says, was renowned

"For building carriages and boats, And streets, and chapels, and pavilions, And regulating all the votes, And all the principles, of millions."

"The first gentleman of Europe," it may be confidently stated, never built a boat half so neat, smart-looking, and handsome as the yachts which, at the proper season, lie in the river in front of those sham Oriental baths mentioned above. At Gravesend are to be seen assembled the finest yachts which frequent the Thames, vessels, some of them with twelve or fourteen stout sailors to man them, and as clean and smart-looking as anything to be seen within the whole compass of the seas.

As becomes one of the oldest ports in the kingdom, Gravesend--it was called Gravesham in Domesday Book--is a town of narrow streets, of quaint shops and houses, of old-fashioned inns and close courts and alleys. The face which it turns to the river is like that of a battered old sailor--scarred, sun-beaten, weather-worn, but pleasant and honest withal. As in most seafaring towns, there is one long, cramped street, in which the houses seem to elbow each other, running, a little back from the river, almost from end to end! Far as it is removed from the sea, there is a fine salt-water savour about Gravesend, and it has also the recommendation of being situated in a pleasant country, for, after ascending its steep streets and threading here and there a leafy lane, there bursts upon the sight a glorious stretch of agricultural land, beautifully uneven, with hills of gentle slope, and occasional patches of woodland and garden and copse.

Of the history of Gravesend there is little that need be said. James II. lived here, as Lord High Admiral, when he was Duke of York, and escaped hence in a girl's clothes when he was flying from his enemies. On a hill behind the town there stands an old windmill, which is also a landmark, and which occupies the site of a beacon, the lighting of which was a call to arms. Aymer de Valence, one of the heroes of Thackeray's boyhood, and of many thousands of other boys of his period, founded and endowed a church just outside Gravesend when Edward II. was king. In 1780 five thousand soldiers were marched here to make a sham attack on Tilbury Fort, and were handsomely refreshed, _at the expense of the General_, when they had energetically stormed that fortification with blank cartridge. About that time, or a little later, there was a great scheme to make a tunnel under the Thames, between the town and the fort, which scheme ended in nothing but the formation of a company which appears to have spent fifteen or sixteen thousand pounds to no purpose.

At the present day Gravesend is much resorted to, first for the sake of Rosherville Gardens, and then for tea and shrimps, for which it has a reputation quite unique. Sam Weller's pieman could make a beef, mutton, or "a weal-and-hammer" out of the same festive kitten. The good folk of Gravesend can serve up shrimps in ways so various, and so tempting, that it is possible to dine off shrimps alone. At Gravesend, too, whitebait may be eaten with as much pleasure as at Greenwich, and the visitor to one of the inns of the place may watch the boatmen fishing for the whitebait which is shortly to be served up to him hot from the kitchen.

It is at Gravesend, indeed, that whitebait is now caught in most profusion. The boatmen pursue the dainty little fish in small open boats, and take it in long, peak-shaped nets, very small of mesh and delicate of workmanship. Whitebait first became celebrated in connection with the British Parliament towards the end of the last century, when Sir Robert Preston, member for Dover, was in the habit of asking his friend, Mr. Rose, Secretary of the Treasury, to dine with him at Dagenham when the session closed. Whitebait must have been had at Dagenham in plenty, and Mr. Rose made favourable report of it to Mr. Pitt; so it came about that the Premier was invited to try the whitebait for himself. Then it was that an annual Ministerial dinner was organised, the scene of the whitebait banquets changing from Dagenham to Greenwich, with an occasional dinner at Blackwall. "Yesterday," says the _Morning Post_ of September 10th, 1835, "the Cabinet Ministers went down the river in the Ordnance Barges to Blackwall, to the 'West India' Tavern, to partake of their annual fish dinner. Covers were laid for thirty-five." And for something like that number covers still continue to be laid, though the Ministerial whitebait dinner now depends on the taste of Premiers, and is no longer _de rigueur_.

The whitebait itself has been almost as much the subject of discussion as the origin of salmon. Is it the young of herring, or of sprats, or of fish of many varieties? The question would seem easy enough to answer, though it can scarcely be said to have been finally answered even now. The one thing really certain about whitebait is, that it is a very dainty fish, equally good whether white or "devilled," as grateful to the palate whether fried in flour or broiled with a little cayenne. Scientific opinion, after once appearing to be convinced that whitebait is young shad, now inclines to the conviction that it is the young of a variety of species. The whitebait itself, however, seems to conspire in the concealment of its identity. Kept in captivity on one occasion, it will turn into herring, kept in captivity on another, it becomes the common sprat. Some specimens, indeed, have been known to assert themselves as pipe-fish, gobies, and stickleback, so that, though the whitebait fishermen resolutely assert the individuality of the species, it will perhaps be on the whole more safe to take sides with the men of science--and the accomplished cook.

There is, from some points of view, no more interesting spot on the Thames than Gravesend Reach. Here, after narrowing for a portion of its distance, the river spreads out again, and proceeds on a perfectly straight course to Cliff Creek. Gravesend Reach is three miles and a half in length, and is usually more populous with shipping than any other point between the Nore Light Ship and the Pool. All outward bound ships must take their pilots on board at Gravesend, and so it frequently occurs that here the last farewells are said and the last kisses are given. In the Reach, vessels wait for the changing of the tide, so that at one period of the day it is full of ships with their sails furled, and, at another, of vessels newly spreading their canvas to the wind. A breezy, stirring place is Gravesend Reach, enthralling at all hours and in all weathers, stormy sometimes, sometimes as calm as a lake on a windless night, but most beautiful on grey, uncertain days, when the light shivers downward through flying clouds, and breaks and sparkles on tumbling crests of wave; when the ships at anchor sway hither and thither on the turbulent waters, and make with their masts and cordage a continuous and confused movement against the sky; when the barges coming up from the Medway tear and strain under their canvas like horses impatient of the bit; when the half-furled sail flaps and battles in the wind, and the sea-birds, now darting to the water, now leaping towards the flying clouds, seem to be driven about against their will. Gravesend Reach, where David Copperfield said adieu to Mr. Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge, where little Em'ly waved her last farewell, where we lost sight of Mr. Micawber and the twins, where so many tears have been shed, and so many hearts have seemed to be broken! What a ceaseless current of commerce flows through it, inward to the mightiest of European cities, outward to every country that the sun shines on. Whither is bound the vessel that is unfurling its sails yonder? Whither! To far Cathay, it may be; to obscure ports on the furthermost verges of the world.

/Aaron Watson/.