called Import and Export respectively, both with the greatness of
their trade departed from them already. Picturesque and clean as
docks go, these twin basins spread side by side the dark lustre of
their glassy water, sparely peopled by a few ships laid up on buoys
or tucked far away from each other at the end of sheds in the
corners of empty quays, where they seemed to slumber quietly
remote, untouched by the bustle of men's affairs--in retreat rather
than in captivity. They were quaint and sympathetic, those two
homely basins, unfurnished and silent, with no aggressive display
of cranes, no apparatus of hurry and work on their narrow shores.
No railway-lines cumbered them. The knots of labourers trooping in
clumsily round the corners of cargo-sheds to eat their food in
peace out of red cotton handkerchiefs had the air of picnicking by
the side of a lonely mountain pool. They were restful (and I
should say very unprofitable), those basins, where the chief
officer of one of the ships involved in the harassing, strenuous,
noisy activity of the New South Dock only a few yards away could
escape in the dinner-hour to stroll, unhampered by men and affairs,
meditating (if he chose) on the vanity of all things human. At one
time they must have been full of good old slow West Indiamen of the
square-stern type, that took their captivity, one imagines, as
stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of the waves with their
blunt, honest bows, and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, or
logwood sedately with their own winch and tackle. But when I knew
them, of exports there was never a sign that one could detect; and
all the imports I have ever seen were some rare cargoes of tropical
timber, enormous baulks roughed out of iron trunks grown in the
woods about the Gulf of Mexico. They lay piled up in stacks of
mighty boles, and it was hard to believe that all this mass of dead
and stripped trees had come out of the flanks of a slender,