I should like to know how that book got to London. Somewhere in it is
the name of the ship which carried it. Anyhow, I think I can make out
in it the houseflag of that ship. It, was, I believe, one of J. H.
Allan's teak-built craft, a forgotten line--the _Rajah of Cochin_, the
_Copenhagen_, the _Lincelles_,--though only just before the War, in the
South-West India Dock, I met a stranger, a seaman looking for work, who
regretted its disappearance, and the new company-owned steamers; for he
said they were good ships, "but more than that," he told me, "Allan was
an old gentleman who knew his own ships, and knew his men." This
stranger said you forget a ship now as soon as you are paid off, "and
glad to," and "you don't ever know who owns her, even if there's a
strike. Parsons and old maids and Cardiff sharks, I reckon."

Very likely. But what sharks once were in it have all disappeared from
my Register. It belongs to those days when, if you went to New
Zealand, you had to go by sailer; when the East India Dock had an
arcade of jib-booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a varnished shark's
tail terminal--the _Euterpe_, _Jessie Readman_, _Wanganui_, _Wazmea_,
_Waimate_, _Opawa_, _Margaret Galbraith_, _Helen Denny_, _Lutterworth_,
and _Hermione_. There were others. What is in these names? But how
can we tell? There were personal figureheads, there were shapely
forms, each with its own narrative of adventure, there was the
undiscovered sea, and there was youth; and these have gone.

It is all very well to say that the names and mere words in this old
Register have no more meaning today than a railway time-table of the
same date. Hardly to be distinguished in the shadows in some corners
of St. Paul's Cathedral from which night never quite goes, there are
certain friendless regimental colours. Few of us know now who bore