they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work,
manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of
distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of
tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with
an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from
the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore
ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the
various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen
distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the
serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men's houses.
But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and
desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a
slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the
bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for
miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all
to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West
Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined
with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a
stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying
the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-
gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges
of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock,
the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.

Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick
pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp
of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which
had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at
the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone
out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening