her. Once we were a famous shipping parish. Now we are but part of
the East End of London. The steamers have changed us. The tides do
not rise high enough today, and our shallow waters cannot make home for
the new keels.

But to the old home now the last of the sailing fleet is loyal. We
have enough still to show what once was there; the soft gradations of a
ship's entrance, rising into bows and bowsprit, like the form of a
comber at its limit, just before it leaps forward in collapse. The
mounting spars, alive and braced. The swoop and lift of the sheer, the
rich and audacious colours, the strange flags and foreign names. South
Sea schooner, whaling barque from Hudson's Bay, the mahogany ship from
Honduras, the fine ships and barques that still load for the antipodes
and 'Frisco. Every season they diminish, but some are still with us.
At Tilbury, where the modern liners are, you get wall sides mounting
like great hotels with tier on tier of decks, and funnels soaring high
to dominate the day. There the prospect of masts is a line of derrick
poles. But still in the upper docks is what will soon have gone for
ever from London, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with sometimes a
white sail floating in it like a cloud. We had a Russian barquentine
there yesterday. I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships,
the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse
spars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered lift
skywards of main and mizzen poles. The model of this Russian ship was
as memorable as a Greek statue. It is a ship's sheer which gives
loveliness to her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, finely
poised, sure of herself, in profile. She was so slight a body, so tall
and slender, but standing alert and illustriously posed, there was
implied in her slenderness a rare strength and swiftness. And to her
beauty of line there went a richness of colour which made our dull