lightship marks the divergence. The coasting traffic inclines to
the north; the deep-water ships steer east with a southern
inclination, on through the Downs, to the most remote ends of the
world. In the widening of the shores sinking low in the gray,
smoky distances the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile
fleet of good ships that London sends out upon the turn of every
tide. They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore.
Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for
the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the open:
while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and in
bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river
between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the
Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with
the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat,
like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames
is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem
very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is
Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum
ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks,
low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the
fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated
in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level
marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land
rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in
the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.

Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of
factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above
the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking
quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset,