come out of the opera-house. But London, the oldest and greatest
of river ports, does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open
quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like
the face of a forest, is the London waterside. It is the waterside
of watersides, where only one aspect of the world's life can be
seen, and only one kind of men toils on the edge of the stream.
The lightless walls seem to spring from the very mud upon which the
stranded barges lie; and the narrow lanes coming down to the
foreshore resemble the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth
where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical streams.

Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London
spread out unsuspected, smooth, and placid, lost amongst the
buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie
concealed in the intricate growth of houses with a few stalks of
mastheads here and there overtopping the roof of some four-story
warehouse.

It is a strange conjunction this of roofs and mastheads, of walls
and yard-arms. I remember once having the incongruity of the
relation brought home to me in a practical way. I was the chief
officer of a fine ship, just docked with a cargo of wool from
Sydney, after a ninety days' passage. In fact, we had not been in
more than half an hour and I was still busy making her fast to the
stone posts of a very narrow quay in front of a lofty warehouse.
An old man with a gray whisker under the chin and brass buttons on
his pilot-cloth jacket, hurried up along the quay hailing my ship
by name. He was one of those officials called berthing-masters--
not the one who had berthed us, but another, who, apparently, had
been busy securing a steamer at the other end of the dock. I could